NEW YORK Chambers Fine Art For more than 10 years, the eminent Chinese artists Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen (who had achieved individual acclaim before they started to collaborate) have been constructing an enduring project based on the chopstick. Their first “Chopstick” exhibition in 2002, which celebrated their 10-year anniversary as a married couple, engaged the eating implement as a metaphor for the personal bonds that connect them.
TAICHUNG, TAIWAN National Museum of Fine Arts “Mediation/Meditation,” the third edition of the Asian Art Biennial, was curated by Iris Shu-ping Huang of the National Museum. The dual theme made an additional allusion to Japanese economist Kenichi Ohmae’s theory of the M-shaped society, which describes the global decline of the middle class and its replacement with equal peaks of rich and poor.
DUBLIN Kevin Kavanagh Gallery About two weeks before this exhibition opened, I was sitting at the bedside of Éamonn O’Doherty in a Dublin cancer hospital. He had been given two months to live (though, in the end, he only got three weeks), but he faced dying in the same manner that he broached his sculpture: with impish and iconoclastic good humor, a lunchtime bottle of red wine, and a request that I do a “proper” interview with him, “proper” meaning a no-holds-barred, utterly indiscreet assassination of all those he considered morally contemptible in the world of art.
WEST VANCOUVER, CANADA West Vancouver Museum Sonny Assu, an Aboriginal artist from Vancouver, is gaining attention for his reversal of early 20th-century art history. More than 100 years after Western artists “advanced” art by looking “back” at Aboriginal culture, Assu is turning to Western art to modernize Aboriginal traditions of the Northwest Coast.
PHILADELPHIA Fleisher/Ollman Gallery For more than a decade, Paul Swenbeck has made cross-media work that materially explores the translation of marginalized practices into contemporary culture. His visual and theoretical sources range from the occult (he grew up in Salem, Massachusetts), folk expression, and pre-scientific phenomena to sci-fi illustration and the debunked psychoanalytic experiments of Wilhelm Reich.
CINCINNATI Manifest Gallery Alysia Fischer’s recent exhibition, “Consumption,” featured seven extraordinarily handsome works made from what she calls “diverted materials,” specifically inner tubes from a local landfill.
NEW YORK Hosfelt Gallery Although many artists incorporate figurines, toys, animals, and signs into their work, Liliana Porter’s take on this strategy stands out for its overtly political, international layers. For example, one work in her recent show, The Intruder, juxtaposes a crowd of over 50 figurines varying in size, era, material, and culture.
NEW YORK Jim Kempner Fine Art “ICED,” Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese’s recent exhibition, had genuine political clout—a real achievement for this collaborating couple, since so much political art in America undermines itself with rhetorical overstatement and callow self-righteousness.
NEW YORK United States Mission to the United Nations In 2011, the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies (FAPE) launched one of its most expansive and comprehensive installations of sculpture, located in the United States Mission to the United Nations. FAPE began in 1986 with an art and restoration project in Beijing.
Joyce Beckenstein: When Sculpture published a previous interview with you in 2003, your work was very different. In broad strokes, how would you characterize the changes? Sarah Sze: I came to art with more training in architecture and painting.
