WONDER FOTO DAY
Artist based photo fair in Taipei, Taiwan
16 – 18 March 2018 – Songshan Cultural and Creative Park, Taipei
Wonder Photo Day prides itself to promote photography based art from Asian continent, mostly young artists from Taiwan, Japan and China, although I have seen the growing participation from other Asian Countries.
initially I introduced this project to Hengki Koentjoro, a good friend of mine, hoping he would join this fair. He applied and got accepted, so I joined to help him setting up and selling his works. He gained his international reputation through black and white photoraphy and he is currently the ambassador of Hasselblad. His presence has inspired many artists and visitors during WFD, proving that the magic of black and white photography will always remain.
Besides Hengki, there were two Indonesian young artists joining the fair. The creative-thought provoking – Ve Dhanito came with her project Mind Body Brain – a mini installation on her table focusing on women. Whereas Chris Bunjamin showed his varied works in photo and merchandise, his colored works shows the beauty and humor in the unexpected moment of life.
What is photography without a publisher? The famous Afterhours Books publishing house joined the fair, bringing some of their books to the public. Together with him, Vanessa van Houten, a German photographer living in Jakarta, presenting her latest project, Here Now. Besides this new publication, she showed her earlier books, Raw. This book and its subject matter managed to make the viewers cry in the Afterhours booth.
When people say that music binds people, so does photography.
www.vanessavanhouten.com
www.afterhoursbook.com
www.dialogue-artspace.com
Here the works of one international artist and three Indonesian artists during WFD
Vanessa van Houten – www.vanessavanhouten.com
Chris Bunjamin – www.chrisbunjamin.com
Ve Dhanito – www.vedhanito.com
Hengki Koentjoro – www.hengki-koentjoro.com
VISITS TO MIGUEL ANGEL CARDENAS
Bi-weekly visit to Miguel Angel Cardenas residence in Amsterdam
2007 – 2010
Started as a volunteer work aiming to accompany senior citizens that are in social isolation, I was matched by the local foundation Schrorer stichting with Miguel Angel Cardenas. It was like match made in heaven. I considered this as an art project as it involved artistic influence on each other. It is probably on very personal level. Each visit I brought in the current development of art and culture, taking him out to art venues and restaurants. He introduced me to his personal perceptions, colors and conceptual art from his era (1970-1980). He was a very outspoken personality that loved live in all sense.
Miguel-Ángel Cárdenas was born in 1934 in Espinal, Colombia, and has been living in the Netherlands since 1962. He studied architecture at the National University in Bogota, Colombia, from 1952-1953 and visual art at the Bogota Academy of Fine Art in 1955-1957. He has taught at various art schools including the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and the AKI, Enschede. His work has been frequently supported by grants from the Dutch government and exhibited in solo and group shows in The Netherlands, Columbia, the USA and elsewhere. Cárdenas created a large and varied body of video work that explores many themes including sexuality, desire and his own Latin American heritage. His videos range in approach from the greyscale real-time style typical of early 1970’s recorded performances to elaborate narratives and montages that make use of more advanced editing techniques. Cárdenas’ works often involve elements of campy humor, including frequent parodies of the serious, masochistic attitude that some performance artists have towards their bodies. Formally and conceptually, Cárdenas’ videos sometimes employ figures of duality which contrast or duplicate one another. His works can be characterised as New Realism and Pop Art painter and a pioneer of video art in the Netherlands. His works cover a variety of artistic media, including painting, drawing, video, photography, object assemblages and digital art.
After his decease in 2015, he got more attention with a solo show in Andrea Rosen gallery, a group show in Stedelijk museum. Recently a mini retrospective of his works in Rozenstraat gallery in Amsterdam. For the latest, I did an radio interview with Mauricio Limon to discusss my relationship with him. Take a listen:
Once we went together to an art fair, the first half an hour he was approached by countless museum curators and directors. It was my very first time to walk together with an art celebrity. Check the video evident below:)
Art Amsterdam With Miguel Angel Cardenas and Musa
ANEGDOTES
Paintings by Mikołaj Obrycki
Bochenska Gallery – Koneser Cultural Centre – Ząbkowska 27/31- Warsaw, Poland
29 June – 28 July 2012
A thought is confronted with a plane and turns out to be a thought only. It becomes exhausted when faced with abrupt appearance of forms. It longs to contemplate, but is left just with feeling. To feel, it needs to get beyond any truisms. Instead of a companion of painting experience, it becomes an empathic witness of the inner reality of the creator, the painter, Mikołaj Obrycki. Born in Szczecin, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, he has exhibited his works mainly in Poland but also abroad, in Stockholm, London and Paris.
His paintings, though seem to be tied to the empirically- experienced reality, defy rationalization. Reality-like forms merely rub against it to promptly fall into abstraction in a space uprooted from the world. The space itself, reminiscent of the works of Klee, Miro or Bacon, seems to be devoid of air, sometimes becomes a plane where figures appear, in other cases it seems to absorb the forms. For Obrycki the colour is equally important, sometimes falling into almost monochromacy, sometimes exuberantly exploding on canvas, aiming in the direction of works of Gert and Uwe Tobias and Daniel Richter.
However heterogeneous and elusive these works seem, they have one thing in common- restlessness, which Obrycki’s canvases are primed with. Dealing with them requires the viewer to be a witness of this violent process. Like their creator, the viewer should follow a desire which cannot be satisfied. Imagination in state of anxiety, which is omnipresent in the works, is constantly faced with existence, reality on a stage of desintegration. Perhaps this is the question posed by Obrycki, the question of reality, which remains a gaping wound, appearing in shapes, which sometimes vaguely emerge from the background, and sometimes are separated from it with a brutal contrast of colours.
The works of Mikołaj Obrycki, born in 1977 in Szczecin, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, are in private collections throughout Europe – including Poland, but also in the United States and Hong Kong. He has had more than fifty exhibitions in Poland (including BWA in Sieradz, Poznan and Szczecin) and abroad- in Stockholm, Paris, London and Copenhagen.
The works of 2011-2012 will be exhibited. Dealing with them requires us to witness a rapid process of coming into forms. Like their creator, we should follow a desire impossible to satisfy. Anxiety of imagination, which is strongly reflected by these paintings, is continuously faced with a certain type of existence, that is a reality in a state of desintegration.
ABSTRACT OVERTURE
Featuring works by: Ronald de Bloeme (The Netherlands ), Joachim Grommek (Germany)and Judy Millar (New Zealand)
Bochenska Gallery – Centrum Kulturalne Koneser -Ząbkowska 27/31, 03-736 Warsaw, Poland
03 November – 03 December 2011
In Abstract Overture, Bochenska Gallery and E1 Nation Art projects present their vision on future developments in abstract painting. It will be the first artistic event organized by the Dutch art collector and curator Iwan Yamin. He will present three artists that challenge the way abstract paintings are created,presented and can be interpreted.Through influences ranging from marketing strategies to mimicry and new techniques of reproduction Ronald de Bloeme, Joachim Grommek and Judy Millar have started a new chapter for abstraction, focusing on visual codes and processes of recognition.
Watch the Youtube video on this exhibition – Polish National TV coverage on primetime evening news.
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