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Inspiration Friday’s

As much as I love schedules and sometimes I find it hard to stick to one. But, I would like to give it a shot. There’s so much interesting art, photography, music in the world, I thought having a Friday focus of inspiration on the blog may be fun.

This week, Matt send over a link to an incredible installation at the Gladstone Gallery in New York. The artist is Huang Yong Ping. He was a founding member of the Xiamen Dad group in China during the mid-1980’s. The exhibition is Tower Snake. As stated in his press release, “He is known to use a variety of media in his work and merges the symbols of Eastern and Western art historical traditions and political events to explore the intersection of individual experience and broader manifestations of culture.

The description in the press release of the actual piece takes the exhibit to an elevated level that I feel you should understand before viewing. For those of you interested in knowing what the artist intended, here it is….

For this exhibition, Huang Yong Ping will create a monumental installation comprised of a single temple-like construction. Taking its form from the spiral of a coiled snake skeleton, a ramp of bamboo gradually rises taking the viewers from the tail toward its head. In transforming the rib cage of the snake into a series of arches, Huang Yong Ping echoes the architecture of a Gothic cathedral, simultaneously reworking this Western style with Eastern materials and subtly transforming the cruciform symbol of Christian salvation into the tangled figure of Edenic temptation. More importantly, this Tower of Babel-like sculpture depends upon the natural material of bamboo reaffirming its link to Eastern construction. Huang Yong Ping subverts well-worn cultural symbols to create seemingly disparate juxtapositions that unfold into nuanced takes on history, national identity, and artistic practice.

Have a great weekend everyone!

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I Can Hardly Believe My Eyes

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