I'm a visual artist obsessed with optimism. Originally from California, now living in New York. This is a space where I think through and share notes on art, art worlds, transparency, positive psychology, and my process.
Learn more about me and see my work at ChristineWongYap.com.
LMCC Workspace Residency: Update #1: What, Who, Where, When, How, Why, and What I've Been Up To
Art Competition Odds: Lighthouse Works' 2020 Spring and Summer Fellowship Program
Top Seven: Syllabus, Glass Blowing, Parasite, Color Pen
Twelve Months in Art Competitions, 2018-2019
Resilience through Sports Psychology, Heartbreak, and Mindfulness
See: Maurice Sendak at the Morgan Library
More Notes from a Juror
Why 'Name and Shame' When You Could 'Name and Fame'?
Resources for Becoming an Activist
Why I Started (and Still Write) This Blog
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Here's something to think about: longevity and art practice generally. Vija Celmins, at age 26, painted this lamp (image 1). Fifteen years later, this painting was in her first museum retrospective. Every month when I open my storage unit bill, a tiny part of me wonders if or when the work inside will be exhibited. So I imagined 15 years of storage unit bills, and how back then it must have been validating to have a retrospective. But look now! Fifty years later, how lucky are we as viewers to be able to view this work in the Met Breuer. How important it was for Celmins to persevere, to believe in herself, and for others to believe in her, so this work was preserved, cared for, and lent back to the museum, now. .. Here's something else to think about: longevity and looking… Back in undergrad, my printmaking professor Ken Rignall (rest in power) took a class to @oaklandmuseumca and had us spend some time looking at this painting of a fan (image 2). In his own work, Ken painted in grays and blacks, and so he taught us to see beyond the seeming neutralness, to understand that ALL COLORS can make up grays and blacks. I returned to this painting over the years on my visits to OMCA, but only at the Met (20+ years after first encountering this work) did I realize it was by Vija Celmins. .. One more thing: the longevity of a practice... I love Vija Celmin's work, it's startling in is realism. At the retrospective, it's also impressive how constant she has been in her career. And I love seeing the work of a contemporary female artist, who worked in modest scales, celebrated like this. .. Vija Celmins at the Met Breuer (@metmuseum) closes January 12. It is truly amazing. Highly recommended. .. Image descriptions. Image 1: A realistic painting of a double lamp, with the goosenecks turning the bulbs toward the viewer, rendered in warm grays. Image 2: A realistic painting of a vintage electric metal fan, on a flat dark grey background. Image 3: A realistic graphite drawing of clouds, seen from below, with sunlight.
I just finished notebook number 44: 250 pages in 2 months with #calligraphy practice ✍️🎀, notes on #positivepsychology 🤓, #sketches for projects to make 🧵🎨🖌️ at the @lmcc_nyc Workspace studio. .. I love a #dotgrid. .. #leuchtturm1917
Takeover time! I'm this month's GLINT artist. I'll post at GLINT @glintproject, revealing "the moment when the work happens," as phrased by project instigator and UK artist Jessica Longmore (@Longmore.jessica). She shared with me that she's interested in how studios influence artists, and how artists find ways to keep working outside of the studio, during off-times between family and professional responsibilities. Some aspects of my practice are almost post-studio. Yet, I'm two months in to a 10-month studio residency. Let's see what happens! 😉 .. #artmaking #artistsonart #glintproject #Repost @glintproject • • • • • •
On Be(com)ing an Artist, Citizen and Arts Community member, by Christine Wong Yap
Art & Development
Meta-Practice
Art Competition Odds
Make Things (Happen)
White stuff I like, more or less
June 15, 2008 cwongyapActivist Imagination, aesthesis, aesthetic theory, contemporary art, Iceberger Gallery, Johanna Drucker, Lindsey White, Little Tree Gallery, Richard T. Walker, Stuff White People Like, Theodore Adorno Leave a comment
I have always liked Lindsey White's photos. Her new photos and videos make up a nice show at Partisan Gallery, somebody's house on Guerrero. Endearingly earnest, like her previous portraits, but less quirky-cute, and more chance-magic (in the end, it's just about personal taste: arty vs. Art). The new works are about light, and veer between optimism and the pathetic/mundane.
A bad pic of a great photo by Lindsey White, of a spear of light on a pillow. She shoots digital and 120mm, if you wanted to know.
A multi-channel video installation; each video is a single shot of a single thing. It functions like a sequence of photos in a book, only with slight movement and minimal audio. Great!
Also liked Richard T. Walker's two-channel video installation at Iceberger. More instruments, letters to nature, human projection onto the romantic ideals of nature. His English accent adds something; for no good reason, I assume that it suggests more of an awareness of the Romantic period than if he were American. Maybe my visit to Cumbria, the land of all those English Lake writers, has something to do with it.
It was a nice summer evening, and I enjoyed chatting with artists and meeting some guys showing with Little Tree Gallery, but I couldn't shake my self-awareness of the New Mission, as youthful gallery-goers drank Pabst on the sidewalk for hours on end, just like during First Fridays in Oakland. What's at stake is so different for different people, isn't it? Earlier in the day, I found a kindred iconoclast willing to challenge hipsters' endorsement of dingy ethnic restaurants in rough neighborhoods like Tu Lan and Shalimar. WTF? Thanks to the digital age, there is a source to explain this behavior: Stuff White People Like. See #91: San Francisco and #71: Being the only white person around.
Another thing White People like is critical theory (see #81: Graduate School). I must be White, because the podcast of Johanna Drucker's lecture at SVA blew my mind. The artist and author challenges Adorno's 20th c. aesthetic theory and explains her notion called aesthesis, a specialized form of knowing (through art), characterized by knowing grounded in central experience, emergent experiences and co-dependent relationships. In contrast to Adorno's assertion that art is autonomous, Drucker suggests that art is complicit and co-dependent; that it is in fact a form of commodity production, even if we don't like to think of it so.
A tasty morsel:
She classifies low-brow pop paintings and drawings that reference comics or media as:
combinatoric mass culture kitsch production
And on the meat of the matter, for me:
To dispute Adorno's assertion that because art is removed from the world of utilitarian objects, they are inherently resistant, Drucker says:
The notion of resistance [inherent to art] will die hard because it is the last link to the kind of utopian belief that … has a long history with modernism, and certainly gets reformulated again in mid-19th century with the coming of political philosophy…. The shift to political philosophy from 'regular' philosophy is that rather than understanding or describing the condition of knowledge or sensation or the mind, the political philosophy said the point is to change it. So the task of change — which again, the world is broken, we do need to fix it — … comes to be identified with the avant garde and … the role of art assumes a moral hierarchy and a moral high ground for the artist and the work of art. And that seems to me to be highly suspect. And that's where I come back to complicity. We are not better than the world we inhabit….
The notion that difficulty, in and of itself, is a form of resistance that performs some sort of political efficacy—it's just not true. It's what I call magical politics. It's like, where exactly does the transformation of power relations and political agency actually occur in those difficult works? It doesn't….
I make difficult work. I write really obscure things. But I don't imagine that they are making a transformation of the political structure. I do imagine, and I do believe that they transform the meme world. That's what we do. We are meme makers. We transform. We reimagine. We remodel. We offer new models of cognition and new models of experience. And we produce that as an effect. We don't produce that inherently in objects. It is an effect of what we do.
I had similar feelings of caution around the sense of artists having a moral high ground in the process of developing new work for Activist Imagination. So it's great to hear Drucker put a historical framework around the conditions of art-viewing that we are subject to, and available for displacement if we choose.
→ Physics dilettante
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