A retired cargo ship that operated between Mokpo and Jejudo Island off South Korea for 35 years has become an architectural installation doubling as a summertime shelter in the courtyard of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul.

The installation “Temp’L” by Shin Hyung-chul and Claire Shin’s Shinslab Architecture is the winning design in this year’s Young Architects Programme.

The Korean edition of the programme, launched by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1998, has since 2014 selected the best architectural designs that are then installed in the museum courtyard.

“It felt like a treasure hunt finding the retired ship,” says Shin Hyung-chul, who travelled to Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and China scouting out candidates. Getting one transported to South Korea would have proved problematic, but he found a suitable vessel that was about to be dismantled in the southwestern port city of Mokpo.

“I discovered aesthetics on its rusty surface and scars and in the colours created from more than 20 layers of paint,” he says. “I realised that an industrial object can be a work of art!”

The architects dismantled the 60-tonne cargo ship and added flourishes including Marcel Duchamp’s infamous urinal and Le Corbusier’s “An Eye that Cannot See”. More concepts and ideas that Shin borrowed from modern architecture are on view at Gallery 8, along with models made by finalists in the Young Architects Programme.

“‘Temp’L’ commences with an analysis,” says Sean Anderson, associate curator of architecture at MoMA in New York City, who was one of the judges. “Artists and architects tested boundaries of modernism including Marcel Duchamp, and in so doing, reconfigured these pieces of our daily life that we overlook and disregard, including environmental issues.”

Shin likens the redesigned ship to the ready-made urinal titled “Fountain” that Duchamp mockingly proclaimed to be art and displayed in a 1917 exhibition, shattering forever the notion that art had to be made by artists.

“Fountain” comprised “two popular concepts in contemporary art and architecture – presenting objects themselves as art and recycling materials”, says Park Geun-tae, curator of the project.

Le Corbusier greatly influenced Shin’s idea to transform a ship into an art installation. The French architect “presented the idea of finding beauty in industrial architecture, such as ships and aeroplanes”, Shin says, and once showed a photograph of Paris landmarks lined up, “with their shadows forming the shape of a huge ocean liner. He titled it ‘An Eye that Cannot See’.”

Shin turned his ship upside down and planted trees inside it to create a garden. In contrast to the sturdy exterior, the inside is filled with green leaves, a place passers-by can rest. He cut several holes in the hull to let in the breeze.

“Le Corbusier said, ‘Architecture is a machine for living,'” Shin says. “I think architecture should be alive.”

 

London’s Tate Modern museum has unveiled a vast pyramidal extension providing extra gallery space for the millions of guests who pour through its doors each year.

The modern-art museum has been a roaring success since it opened in 2000, with more than five million people now annually visiting the former power station, whose silhouette looms over the south bank of the River Thames.

This is more than twice the number of visitors as originally planned for, leaving gallery-goers jostling to see the latest exhibitions and requiring more floor space.

Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron, who were responsible for the building’s original conversion, were chosen for the new “Switch House” project, which cost 260 million pounds (Bt13 billion).

The result is a fractured pyramid of cladded bricks, in keeping with the building’s industrial heritage. Inside, the new space abides by the old rules, using raw concrete, rough wood and painted-black metal railings.

The extension was built on top of giant underground tanks that held oil when the Tate Modern was still a power station, and which have been out of commission as gallery space since the extension works began.

The ground floor, where the old tanks were located, remain pitch black, but visitors will then be thrust into the daylight of the upper floors, thanks to the buildings perforated latticework of bricks, while large windows illuminate rest spaces in-between exhibitions.

One of the gallery’s priorities was to stimulate visitors to ask more questions, and to encourage the exchange of ideas and thoughts among strangers.

To aid this, benches and chairs have been placed in alcoves near lifts and facing the windows that open onto the panoramic terrace of the building’s 10th (top) floor.

“We wanted to stretch to being more environmental, providing big spaces for artists to work in performance and installation, but also more intimate spaces,” says museum chief Nicholas Serota.

Switch House gives the museum 60 per cent more floor space, allowing it to showcase 800 more works by 300 artists, with a focus on countries previously off the modern-art map.

“Over recent years we have been working hard to transform the international collection at Tate to reflect that great art that is made all over the world,” says the museum’s Frances Morris, admitting a previous bias towards art from the United States and Western Europe.

Ukraine’s Boris Mikhailov, Yayoi Kusama from Japan, Brazil’s Ricardo Basbaum and Franco-Algerian Kader Attia are all among the artists on display.

The museum has also bought more works by female artists, including Romanian Ana Lupas, Italian Marisa Merz and American Joan Jonas.

The new building’s first temporary exhibition will be devoted to American Georgia O’Keeffe, whose work has often been unfairly summarised as simple flower paintings, says director of exhibitions Achim Bochardt-Hume.

The ground floor will welcome visitors with installations and live performances, while floors two, three and four will be theme areas exploring the relationship between objects and architecture, between artists and spectators and between artistic works and the urban environment.

The remaining floors hold conference rooms, staff offices, shops, restaurants and cafes and the famous panoramic terrace.

The museum staged a series of events over the weekend, including a choir of 500 singers led by British artist Peter Liversidge.

 

Long before the selfie, there was Cindy Sherman, the shape-shifting artist best known for her often grotesque self-portraits.

For the first time in 20 years, some of her most influential works are going on view at Los Angeles’s Broad Museum, focusing on Hollywood’s feminine cliches in the city that invented them.

From blonde Hitchcock starlets to ageing socialites to pin-up housewives, Sherman has imitated the spectrum of feminine tropes.

“She’s produced some of the most influential work of her time,” says Philip Kaiser, the curator of the exhibition “Imitation of Life”, which opened last Saturday.

One of the world’s most celebrated contemporary artists, Sherman’s works are worth millions and consistently break auction records.

The artist plays her own model, donning elaborate costumes and garish makeup, that play on cinematic imagery.

Her all-encompassing retrospective includes work that plays off stereotypes from Hollywood’s Golden Age, B-list horror films and even porn.

The show, which runs until October, draws “on cinema roles in the shaping of identity and stereotypes”, said Joanne Heyler, director of the Broad Museum, at a press event.

The first major exhibition at the Broad since its grand opening last September, 120 pieces created over four decades by Sherman are on view.

The works come mostly from the collection of real estate mogul and philanthropist Eli Broad, a long-time collector of the 62-year-old artist’s work.

Broad designed Los Angeles’s newest contemporary art museum to house his vast art holdings, including the world’s largest collection of Sherman pieces.

“Cindy has held for a long time a very special place in our collection,” said the wealthy businessman, who remembers being “dazzled” when he discovered her work in the 1980s.

The show is coming at a poignant moment, as critics lambaste Hollywood for the lack of recognition given to women in the industry, at the same time that Hillary Clinton could become the first woman in the White House.

“It’s a particularly interesting time to present to the public the work of an artist which questions the way the media shape feminine identity in images, and how, as an artist, she talks back to these images,” Heyler says.

Each of her photographs resembles a short silent film, she adds.

Sherman sometimes employs the same techniques old Hollywood is known for, including large-scale projections that resemble frozen movie screens, reproduced on entire walls of the Broad.

She also poses with comically frightened expressions, as if taken aback in the style of a “damsel in distress”, putting herself in submissive positions.

In another image, she takes the opposite perspective and adopts the “male gaze”, expressing desire with a bold stare.

The New York artist’s body of work also includes imagery from fashion magazines, like a satirical photo series that plays on images from the 80s. In those works Sherman poses in chic designer outfits with chalky makeup, slumped shoulders and greasy hair.

Because Sherman is her own model, her subjects age along with her, Heyler says.

The artist’s 2008 series satirises ageing society women, clad in sequins with impeccable blowouts.

In her most recent pieces, recently shown in New York, Sherman plays 1920s stars including Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, with their extreme eyebrow arches, turbans and theatrical poses.

“Imitation of Life” will also include Sherman’s black comedy film “Office Killer”, a special screening of the artist’s directorial debut, appropriately looping in a city defined by its film industry.

Works on display in the revamped art museum, which includes the new 10-storey Switch House, include a room full of human hair and car bumpers by Indian artist Sheela Gowda and a tower of 800 radios by Brazil’s Cildo Meireles.

The “new Tate Modern” extension increases the size of the gallery in a former power station on the River Thames by 60percent and will open to the public on Friday following a 260million pound ($367 million) revamp.

Tate Modern said its completely re-hung free collection features some 800 works by more than 300 artists, with half of the solo displays dedicated to women artists.

New acquisitions such as 1930s photography by Lionel Wendt and 1960s sculpture by Lebanon’s Saloua Raouda Choucair add to works by artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henri Mattisse.

“We try to mix the familiar and the unfamiliar. We try toshow that artists don’t just think about their own generation or even about the previous generation,” Tate director Nicholas Serota told Reuters.

“They look at people from 50, 100 years ago. They take inspiration from them, then they build it into their own work…that’s what’s exciting about the whole way we show the collection.”

Like the main gallery, which opened in 2000 and attracts 5million visitors a year, the 65-metre (213.25 ft) high extension was designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron.

Clad in a lattice of 336,000 bricks in a nod to the original power station’s brickwork, the tower has a public viewing level offering 360 degree panoramic views of the British capital.

 

The hierarchy for which Thai society is known vanishes in the exhibition “Born from the Earth”, in which Sompop Burtarad’s portraits of His Majesty the King and a humble farmer hang at the same level. And the remarkable images are actually rendered with paint made from soil.

The show at the National Gallery also features pictures of the venerable monks Prayudh Payutto and Phra Paisal Visalo, social activist Sulak Sivaraksa and musician Surachai Chanthimatorn, among many others.

“Everyone is equal – we’re all born from the earth and we all ultimately return to the earth,” says the 59-year-old Sompop.

In all there are 34 portraits, massive at two-by-2.5 metres, as well as a pair of landscapes and two installations, and the common ingredient is soil – sand, clay and farm-grade dirt collected at places around the Kingdom.

Sompop is known mainly for his colourful paintings of women celebrating Songkran, sometimes bare-breasted, and his “Nang Fah” (“Goddess”) series in which actress Bongkoj “Tuk” Khongmalai appears as a divine creature in traditional attire.

The new portraits are more serious, infused with Buddhist teachings that are “hidden” within the texture of the faces. In place of feminine beauty you see the wrinkles of laughter and worry delineated in the monotone of the soil.

Sompop grew up among the farmlands of Maha Sarakham but, after graduating from Silpakorn University, lived and worked for a while in London. He and National Artists Chalermchai Kositpipat and Panya Vijinthanasarn did the elaborate mural at the Buddhapadipa temple there in the mid-1980s.

He’s often used natural materials in his art, but only began testing earth pigments in 2004, after finding his homeland becoming enfolded in globalisation.

He did a portrait of his Uncle Saad, a medicine man, since deceased. It’s in the current exhibition, all wrinkles, wispy grey hairs and sad eyes, a raw depiction but impressive. Sompop still feels sombre about it. The old man, who always went around barefoot, died after being struck by a car.

His next subjects were his father and mother, Boonmee and Thongbor, and his grandfather Satien. Every time he goes home he does portraits of the plain and good people there. Musician Sombat Simhlar plays Isaan’s version of the mouth organ, the khaen. Ken Dalao, Boonpeng Paipewchaim and Chaweewan Damnoen sing mor lam. Somporn is the farmer in the show, and his daughter Khwanta is also represented.

In Chaiyaphum, Sompop painted Nab, a mor yaa – another master of traditional medicine. He also painted a couple of the musicians from the songs-for-life band Caravan, Surachai “Nga Caravan” Chantimathorn and Mongkol “Wong Caravan” Utok.

His Isaan sitters were the stars of a precursor exhibition titled “Drawn with Earth: Isaan Treasure”, held at Khon Kaen University in 2009.

“I like paying homage to these teachers who devote themselves to the land,” Sompop says.

Perhaps the most poignant homage is his painting of Seub Nakhasathien, the conservationist who died in 1990. The picture has been exhibited several times before, notably at the Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary in Uthai Thani.

In recent years Sompop painted His Majesty, the inspiring monks Prayudh Payutto and Phra Paisal Visalo, National Artist Naowarat Pongpaiboon and the influential economist and educator Puey Ungpakorn.

Sompop is accustomed to painting in oil and acrylic but enjoys the challenge of using soil pigments. “It’s fun and experimental. The soil in different areas has different colours and textures. I always collect samples wherever I go, and when I get home I put them in plastic bags with water for a few days before using them.”

For those of us not so observant, the clay in Maha Sarakham is an orange-pink and the sand yellow. You can get red earth in Khon Kaen – from Moh Din Daeng, aka Red Earth Hill, as a matter of fact. For the darkest pigments you need clay from the bottom of a pond.

“I love the texture of clay and the way it cracks,” Sompop says. “It’s perfect for portraits of hard-working or older people because it captures their facial emotions so well.”

The pigments are a mix of sand, clay, glue made from sticky rice and a Latex adhesive. He paints with quick strokes and uses a palette knife and twigs to build texture.

Of the installations in the show, “The Earth Chedi I” is made from the yellow clay of Maha Sarakham and represents the appeal of rural life, and “The Earth Chedi II” is city detritus coated in red earth.

Sompop has enjoyed great success with his usual style of paintings. Boonchai Bencharongkul of the Museum of Contemporary Art owns dozens, and it was he who commissioned the “Nang Fah” series featuring Tuk, Boonchai’s wife.

The earth paintings are a harder sell, however. Only one so far has been a commission – Mahidol University had him do a gigantic portrait of Prince Mahidol holding Princess Galyani Vadhana for its museum in Nakhon Pathom.

“That commission made me very happy because there are so few people who admire this style of art,” Sompop says. He earned “less than a million”, he reveals candidly.

Still, the “clay collection” is going to have a home of its own when Sompop builds a private museum in Maha Sarakham. The facility will house hundreds of abstracts and landscapes done in soil pigments, along with another 1,000 works created over the past three decades.

Phra Paisal Visalo, one of those portrayed, points out in a catalogue note the exhibition’s underlying messages.

“This show reminds us to respect the earth and realise the value of the principles,” the revered monk writes. “At the same we see the truth revealed that everyone comes from the earth. Man or woman, monk or layman, high status or low – these are merely social presumptions. Do not celebrate that illusion, because we are all the same, born from the earth and ultimately going back to the earth.”

DUST TO DUST

n “Born from the Earth” runs until Sunday at the National Gallery. It’s open Wednesday to Sunday from 9am to 4pm.

n For more details, check http://www.Facebook.com/|TheNationalGalleryBangkok.

 

A new art centre dedicated to showcasing contemporary art and fostering young artists opened Thursday in Sinsa-dong, Seoul.

To mark the opening, the Platform-L Contemporary Art Centre, founded by Taejin International – which manufactures and sells leather goods under the brand Louis Quatorze – is holding two exhibitions that show multimedia works of Korean artist Bae Young-whan and Chinese artist Yang Fudong.

“We aim to make the space one that offers a lot of opportunities for young artists – whether they are designers, architects, curators or art critics. Anyone engaged with contemporary art forms can share and evaluate ideas here,” the centre’s director Park Manu says.

According to Park, Taejin International has been an art patron for a decade, sponsoring a number of arts projects, including the 2014 National Museum of Korea exhibition of masterpieces from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and the Seoul screenings of “Factory Complex” by Korean filmmaker Im Heung-soon which won the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2015.

The new seven-storey building, designed by architect Lee Jeong-hoon of Joho Architecture, is a space for multidisciplinary art – visual art displays, film, performance, theatre, music and dance. The centre features exhibition space, a lecture room for public programs and seminars and a versatile live hall that can showcase films and dance performances.

The exhibitions celebrating the opening are solo shows of Bae and Yang who explore contemporary lives and people through photography, video and sound.

Bae, whose works have been featured at the Venice Biennale in 2005 and the Sharjah Biennale in 2013 and other international exhibitions, features birds as self-portraits of people living in contemporary society in his sculptures and videos. On show at the Platform-L Contemporary Art Centre is a sculpture of a blindfolded parrot emitting sounds of world news broadcast through speakers as if they were the sound of the parrot’s singing.

In a four-channel video installation, a dancer wearing a feather costume dances along to drum beats that makes the dance look like a primitive movement, or a street dance, depending on the viewer’s perspective.

“I wondered whether we are living in a time when we just can’t fly, or suppress our desire to fly,” said Bae, during the press preview. “The desire to fly is represented through the birds in the exhibition.”

Shanghai-based artist-filmmaker Yang Fudong showcases a five-channel video installation that screens his new film “The Coloured Sky: New Women II.” The work portrays the desires of young women aspiring to become movie stars as a metaphor for a sentiment that was prevalent in China under the influence of Western culture in the early 1900s.

“I imagined a picture where a young girl longs for a distant future,” says Yang, who shot the film against artificial settings of a beach, desert and hills.

The art centre will hold four to five exhibitions annually and collect commissioned artworks.

“The direction of the art centre lies in the long-running process of the work we do with young artists. We hope this place will become a creation centre that allows artists and curators to produce creative works and projects,” Park says.

 

It looks like somebody’s shot up all the books in the Reading Room off Silom Road. A second glance reassures you, though, that you’re actually just looking at an art installation.

The library that enjoys being an art gallery is hosting an exhibition on banned

books, “Paradise of the Blind”. The title comes from a novel that happens to be prohibited reading in Vietnam.

Chiang Mai-based artist Sutthirat Supaparinya has loaded a long table with 55 fiction and non-fiction works and a bunch of comic books – the subjects ranging from fantasy to democracy, religion to gender issues – and they’re all banned somewhere, mainly in Asian countries.

“Whenever I come across a banned book, I like to read it to find out why it’s banned,” says the 43-year-old Sutthirat. “I started keeping a list and there were so many books banned in Asia! I searched for the titles in libraries and bookstores here and abroad so I could read them.”

Not surprisingly, she says, “a lot of the books banned in Southeast Asia are related to politics”. If the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are looking for unifying elements, she says, they always have censorship.

Sutthirat delves into not just prohibitions but also the reproduction and destruction of books and the abuse of power and the law.

Before the police descend on the Reading Room with handcuffs and gasoline, it should be noted that all the banned material was legally acquired here. None of the intact books is currently under ban in Thailand.

In fact there was a soldier in civilian clothes at the opening, making sure the art didn’t threaten national security.

The one Thai title on display was once forbidden but has been restored to good graces – “Chom Na Sakdina Thai” (“The Face of Thai Feudalism”) by the late democracy leader Chit Phumisak, written in 1957 under the pseudonym Somsamai Srisootarapan. Reflecting shifting ideologies, it was banned in 1977 and yet is now on the government’s list of 100 recommended reads.

Sutthirat photocopied many of the banned books and ran the pages through a shredder, creating an off-white mountain of destroyed thoughts and ideas that she then moulded into art – a fresh concept emerging from all those that were lost.

Slim curtains of high-calibre bullets hang like wind chimes from the ceiling, aimed squarely at the pulped books and comics. The ordnance was purchased as a “souvenir” at a Thai military camp.

That some of the books on view are banned comes as a surprise. “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, the Lewis Carroll classic, was once verboten in China, and Singapore formerly took a dim view of “And Tango Makes Three”, a children’s book about penguin same-sex parents.

Indonesia won’t let its citizens read “All That is Gone” by one of its citizens, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and you still can’t buy Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” in many countries. Nothing by Rushdie is allowed in Malaysia. South Korea has barred a slew of books including Noam Chomsky’s “Year 501”.

Sutthirat opened her show on May 5, the 50th anniversary of Chit Phumisak’s death. Among the dozens of keen local and foreign readers discussing the issues was a soldier in plainclothes, there to ask her about Chit’s book and the intent of the show. No further action was taken, and the rest of the crowd was highly supportive.

“It’s a fantastic show raising the issue of censorship in this region,” said Vuth Lyno, an art curator from Cambodia. “In my country the government doesn’t care much about English-language books, but it does control Khmer publishing and blocks criticism of the government on any issue, not just political issues. Religious and sexual matter is taboo in Cambodia.”

“Paradise of the Blind” is the first instalment in “Sleepover”, a six-month series designed to turn the library-gallery into a “temporary platform for critical engagement”. It’s the brainchild of the Reading Room’s director, Narawan Kyo Pathomvat, who researched self-organised initiatives in contemporary art and culture in Japan on a fellowship from the Japan Foundation.

“I had the chance to rethink the Reading Room programme and came up with this idea of inviting individuals and organisations involved in socio-cultural matters to use the space,” she says.

“I’m really hoping to open up the Reading Room for multi-disciplinary exchanges and extend a sense of community and co-ownership for both practitioners and audience.”

Coming next month is “Southeast of Now”, in which Southeast Asian art historians and researchers will discuss what’s happening in contemporary art in the region. Patrick Flores from the Philippines and Keiko Sei from Japan will give the lead addresses, and the Reading Room will build a corner of books and catalogues on local art history.

In July writer-illustrator Teepagorn Wutipitayamongkol will be there, talking about the boom in popularity of board games, and SeaWrite Award winner Prabda Yoon will examine issues in contemporary literature in discussion with invited foreign writers.

September will be devoted to the new media, urbanisation and human rights in events involving the Social Technology Institute, the Boonmee Lab and the Thai Netizens Network. They intend to create an online application with which Bangkok residents can report problems to the authorities as they arise.

And, in October, acclaimed filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul will be given the stage to explain how the visual arts can deal with social taboos and political criticism.

To sleep, to dream

The “Sleepover” project runs through October at the Reading Room on Silom Soi 19.

“Paradise of the Blind” by Sutthirat Supaparinya continues through May 29.

June has “Southeast of Now” with Southeast Asian art historians. July has writer-blogger-illustrator Teepagorn Wutipitayamongkol, and August has writer Prabda Yoon.

In September the Thai Netizens Network, Social Technology Institute and Boonmee Lab are lined up, and in October it’s filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

 

Taiwan, internationally renowned for its high-tech industry, has little room for artistic creation. Professional artists have limited space to survive, especially over the last decade when investors with deep pockets have been reluctant to spend money on art.

But young artists have managed to not only survive but stand out in a highly competitively market where the rate of failure is high.

At 36, Tsai Yi-ju is among a generation of Taiwanese painters who refer to themselves as professional artists.

Tsai is known for his ink-brush abstract paintings and in 2010, saw his name listed alongside world-famous Zao Wou-ki in a directory of ethnically Chinese abstract artists published by the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, which named Tsai as one of the youngest influential painters in the world.

Though he considers himself lucky to finally be able to live a relatively decent life solely on proceeds from the sale of his art works, Tsai has gone through a great deal of hardship to get to where he is now.

“For several months in 2006, I ate only toast and drank water every day,” he recalls. “I’d spent all my money on pigments and canvases in preparation for my first major solo exhibition.

“It was probably the hardest time but it was also the most spiritually fulfilling. I knew what I really wanted, and he spent every day trying to fulfil my dream.

A Taipei native, Tsai said he has loved drawing things since he was a child.

He was also very good at it, winning one award after another, even though nobody in his family has ever worked in an art-related area.

During his junior and senior high school years, however, he stopped drawing, because like every other Taiwanese student of his generation, he had to study hard so that he could enter a better school.

He did not pick up his brush until his final year of senior high and only then because he needed to take advantage of his artistic talent to enter university.

In order to prepare, Tsai enrolled in an “art cram school” for a year and successfully entered National Chiayi Teachers College in southern Chiayi County.

To keep him occupied in a largely rural area, he focused on artistic creation and once again fell in love with art.

“I spent so much time drawing – and did not even return to my home in Taipei during long breaks – that my teachers and advisers had to ask me to visit my family,” he says.

“But I was happy painting. Then as now it gives me pleasure and satisfaction that I can’t find anywhere else.”

He was later was accepted by the same university’s graduate school in visual arts and continued his efforts to develop as an artist.

After graduating and completing compulsory military service, Tsai continued to work towards his artistic future.

After several months of living on bread and water, he won the Liu Kuo-song Award in the first Taipei Contemporary Ink Painting competition in 2006.

The honour not only afforded him a major boost in confidence, but also allowed him to walk away with NT$100,000 (Bt108,000) in prize money.

“I spent all the prize money buying pigments and canvases in preparation,” he noted.

With the money as a start-up fund, Tsai managed to survive by selling his art works alone.

Over the decade, he has held more than a dozen solo and joint exhibitions locally and internationally, including most recently in Japan in 2012 and in South Korea in 2015.

His works have been added to the collections of Taiwan’s national museums, including the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art, while other works have been bought by private collectors.

“It’s been a gamble but I have no regrets. No one forced me to take up this career and while I am not thriving financially, I live a spiritually fulfilling life,” he says.

“I feel alive only when I am painting, and this feeling is what keeps me doing what I do. It’s a soul-searching process but it’s very worthwhile.”

 

Some 1,500 artworks are to go under the gavel over the course of five days of auctions expected to fetch more than a billion dollars.

The most important ones will be held in the evening, three hosted by Christie’s and two by Sotheby’s.

First comes the Christie’s thematic evening “Bound to Fail,” with a selection of 39 works of Modern and Contemporary art exploring the idea of commercial failure, and that of taking risks to expand the boundaries of art.

The most troubling piece is a wax and resin statue by Italy’s Maurizio Cattelan, entitled simply “Lui”.

From behind, it looks like a boy on his knees, wearing a gray woolen suit. But walk around front and you see it is Hitler, his hands clasped together in front of him as he gazes upward.

Completed in 2001, it is expected to go for 10-15 million dollars.

“I wanted to destroy it myself. I changed my mind a thousand times, every day,” said Cattelan.

He added: “Hitler is pure fear. It’s an image of terrible pain. It even hurts to pronounce his name. And yet that name has conquered my memory. It lives in my head, even if it remains taboo.”

Loic Gouzer, deputy chairman of post-war and contemporary art with Christie’s who created the theme-oriented auction evenings, called the work “extremely powerful, extremely disconcerting.”

Unlike in the movies, Gouzer said, “artists have hardly ever touched on the issue of Hitler.”

Even some years ago the statue would have been a tough piece to sell, but now the market seems ready, he said. The piece might break the previous eight million dollar record for a Cattelan piece.

Another important work in this particular auction is “One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank” by the American Jeff Koons, who is known for toying with objects from popular culture. This one has a water-filled basketball suspended in the centre of a tank of saline solution. It is expected to lure as much as 12 million dollars.

On May 9, French artists Maurice de Vlaminck and Andre Derain will be the main features of an auction of Impressionist and Modern art by Sotheby’s.

Derain’s “Les voiles rouges”, completed in 1906, is thought to be worth 15-20 million dollars, and “Sous-bois” (1905) by Vlaminck some 12-18 million.

These two painters represented Fauvism, a short-lived movement from the early 20th century that broke with Impressionism and used bold brush strokes and bright colours. These two paintings have never been auctioned before.

Also available at this auction is an exceptionally rare Rodin marble sculpture of embracing lovers, valued at 8 million to 12 million dollars.

Conceived in 1884 and carved in 1901-02 from one block, Sotheby’s has said it expected “Eternel Printemps” to set a new record for a Rodin sculpture in marble.

It also said it was the first time that a sculpture in this medium and of this subject – for which the French artist is perhaps most famous – comes under the hammer in more than two decades.

On May 10 a large painting by Basquiat will be the highlight of Christie’s auction of post-war and Contemporary art. The price estimate is 40 million dollars, not far from the record for a Basquiat piece, which is 48.8 million for “Dustheads” en 2013.

Standing 2.30 metres tall and 5 metres wide (seven-and-a-half-feet by 16 feet), the untitled painting’s centre depicts a sort of self-portrait in the form of a mask, showing the late Haitian-born artist’s fascination with funerary art.

Sotheby’s will serve up two paintings by the Expressionist Twombly on May 11. The first of them, from 1968, is part of his “Tableaux” series depicting curvy, squiggly lines on a drab background. It is valued at more than 40 million dollars.

Another painting from the same series went for 70.5 million dollars last autumn at a Sotheby’s auction. That was a record for works by Twombly, who died in 2011.

The second, “Untitled (Bacchus 1st Version V)”, is valued at more than 20 million dollars.

That same evening Sotheby’s will auction off “deux Etudes pour un auto-portrait” by Francis Bacon (1970). It has only been exhibited twice, in 1971 and 1993, and its estimated value is 22-30 million dollars.

The last evening of Christie’s auctions on May 12 will be dedicated to Impressionist and Modern art and feature some 50 works including a Modigliani valued at 12-18 million dollars.

 

World-renowned artist Christo may be 80, but he boasts the energy of a teenager: After creating umbrella forests, wrapping the Reichstag and decking Central Park in saffron, his new project will see audiences walk on water in Italy.

In more than 50 years, Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude – who died in 2009 but is still associated with his projects – created 22 monumental works. Dozens more have been left in drawers after permits to enact them were refused.

“We have abandoned some, but others remained in our hearts and minds,” Christo says.

“The Floating Piers” is one of them. First conceived in 1970 for the River Plate delta in Argentina, the Christ-like scheme will finally come to life on the idyllic Lake Iseo in northern Italy, from June 18 to July 3.

For 16 days, visitors will be able to walk on three kilometres of floating pontoons across the lake, which will connect the islands of Monte Isola and San Paolo, with their picturesque hamlets and Roman ruins, to each other and the mainland.

Made of 200,000 recyclable polyethylene cubes linked by 200,000 giant screws, the piers will be covered with a dahlia-yellow fabric made of tightly woven nylon designed to change tone as the sun sets and become an intense red when wet.

“All our projects are related to physical sensations. I do not like computers, I do not want to talk on the phone. I am related to things viscerally, not virtually,” says Christo, a lean figure with a shock of white hair.

“Walking on very small paths covered with canvas, a very solid surface, all of a sudden you start walking on water,” says the Bulgarian-born artist with American citizenship, adding that the experience is something “you have to feel”.

“Floating Piers” is the first work by Christo since 2005, when he created “The Gates” in New York’s Central Park with Jeanne-Claude, an installation of 7,500 saffron cloth arches which drew four million visitors.

Forced to abandon the aquatic walkways in Argentina, then again in Japan due to permit troubles, the piers exhibition got the go-ahead in just two years in Italy, thanks to the enthusiasm of local officials and inhabitants.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, both born June 13, 1935, brought three projects to Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, including an installation on Milan’s Cathedral square in which they wrapped a monument to King Vittorio Emanuele.

The couple first rose to fame for their eye-catching packaging of famous landmarks like the Pont Neuf across the Seine in Paris in 1985 and Berlin’s Reichstag in 1995 – a project which took 25 years of bureaucratic wrangling to get off the ground.

An exhibition that focuses mainly on their previous water-based works – complete with preparatory drawings, models, photographs and films – is being shown at the Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia near Lake Iseo until September 18.

The display of creations since the early 1960s includes “Surrounded Islands”, tree-covered gems in Biscayne Bay in Florida that the artists hemmed with pink fabric in 1983, creating a vast water lily effect.

“Floating Piers” comes with a price-tag of some 10 million euros (Bt400 million) and is financed as usual by Christo through the sale of preparatory drawings and models.

The artist has two other projects up his sleeve, though he has run into permit trouble here too. In the first, thought up in 1992, he wants to suspend 10 kilometres of silvery fabric over the Colorado River in the United States.

The second would see him create a 150-metre-high, flat-topped pyramid out of 410,000 multicoloured oil barrels in the desert near Abu Dhabi.

Conceived in 1977, “The Mastaba” would be the tallest project in his career and the only one of Christo’s installations to be permanent.