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      Notre Dame’s Reopening Is Delayed, But a New Show About the Reconstruction Has Opened in a Space Beneath the Cathedral

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      Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral is on track to reopen to worshippers and tourists in 2024—but not in time for that year’s Summer Olympics, as originally hoped.
      In the wake of the fire that nearly destroyed the historic cathedral on April 15, 2019, President Emmanuel Macron had vowed to rebuild the landmark in time for the Paris games.
      That goal was always ambitious, and became even more so after pandemic lockdown restrictions meant work ground to a halt for much of 2020. (Concerns about lead pollution also slowed work.) It took two years just to stabilize and reinforce the structure—which was at risk of collapse—before reconstruction could begin in earnest.
      “My job is to be ready to open this cathedral in 2024. And we will do it,” Jean-Louis Georgelin, who is overseeing the reconstruction efforts, told the Associated Press. “We are fighting every day for that and we are on a good path.”
      A wooden model of Notre Dame cathedral on view in “Notre Dame de Paris: at the heart of the construction site,” a new underground exhibition in the forecourt of the cathedral. Photo by Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images.
      But as recently as last July, the €846 million ($865 million) project appeared to be on track to begin welcoming visitors in summer 2024.
      Now, it seems that travelers planning to attend next year’s Olympics will have to make a return visit if they wish to enter the famed church. (And even after Notre Dame reopens in late 2024, work on the site is expected to continue into 2025.)
      The legend of Sainte-Genevieve Panel of a stained-glass window from the cloister of the sacristy of Notre-Dame cathedral on display in “Notre-Dame de Paris: at the heart of the construction site,” a new underground exhibition in the forecourt of the cathedral. Photo by Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images.
      But while the church remains closed, today marks the opening of the new exhibition “Notre-Dame de Paris: At the Heart of the Construction Site,” staged in an underground space outside the cathedral.
      The attraction is free of charge, unless visitors want to purchase a ticket for a virtual reality show on the history of Notre Dame.
      Remnants of charred wood from Notre Dame cathedral are displayed during “Notre Dame de Paris: at the heart of the construction site,” a new underground exhibition in the forecourt of the cathedral. Photo by Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images.
      The rest of the show gives viewers a glimpse into the ongoing work to reopen the cathedral. Some displays illustrate the devastating effects of the fire, such as a display of charred roof timbers and led ornaments melted by the intense heat of the blaze. The exhibition also celebrates the expertise and skills of workers bringing the church back to life, providing details about how the restoration is being carried out.
      Stained glass windows and other artworks from the cathedral are on view alongside a scale model of Notre Dame, as well as part of the church’s massive pipe organ. The instrument needed to be disassembled and cleaned; putting the 8,000 pipes back together is expected to take a full year.
      The best-know of the thirty seven representations of the Virgin Mary at Notre Dame cathedral on view in “Notre Dame de Paris: at the heart of the construction site,” a new underground exhibition in the forecourt of the cathedral. Photo by Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images.
      As reconstruction work continues, French officials also anticipate beginning to rebuild the church’s rooftop spire, which collapsed during the blaze, later this year.
      “The return of the spire in Paris’s sky will in my opinion be the symbol that we are winning the battle of Notre Dame,” Georgelin said.
      Following the fire, the question of how to rebuild the spire became the subject of a spirited debate. The spire as it stood before the blaze was the work of architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who oversaw an 1844 restoration at Notre Dame, and created many of the well-known sculptural details on the 13th-century cathedral’s exterior, including gargoyles that serve as drain pipes and decorative grotesques.
      A polychrome angel’s head from Notre Dame cathedral on view in “Notre Dame de Paris: at the heart of the construction site,” a new underground exhibition in the forecourt of the cathedral. Photo by Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images.
      Initially, Macron had proposed an international competition to redesign the 315-foot-tall spire with “a contemporary architectural gesture.” The idea sparked some intriguing ideas, but also controversial, and ultimately scrapped.
      A team of 1,000 people are currently at work on the cathedral, using period-appropriate materials and techniques to faithfully rebuild the structure. That includes a stone vaulted ceiling—not modern-day concrete—and the wooden timbers of “The Forest,” as the attic is known, which is being reconstructed from 1,000 150-year-old trees.
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      What Can Digital Art Teach Us About Identity in a Hyper-Technologized World? A New Group Show at the Whitney Weighs In

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      The vicious and oppressive trappings of our hyper-technologized world are baked in and undoing them is going to be mighty difficult. That’s one conclusion drawn from “Refigured,” a presentation of five installation works from the Whitney Museum’s collection now showing in its lobby gallery.
      The artworks have been gathered from across the museum’s existing new media collection as part of an exploration of what physicality could mean in our digitally mediated existence. Together, the pieces by artists Morehshin Allahyari, American Artist, Auriea Harvey, Rachel Rossin, and the pairing of Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman, “experiment with the idea of ‘refiguring,’” said Christiane Paul, the museum’s curator of digital art who composed the show.
      “Through practices of appropriating material forms and reinventing them,” she added, “the artists are challenging what it means to construct or shape identity.”
      At a moment of peak anxiety around A.I. chatbots, im here to learn so :)))))) (2017) is a gut punching reminder that we’ve been here before—namely, seven years ago when Microsoft rolled out Tay, only to pull the plug within hours after the bot began parroting the white supremacist, misogynist bile of Twittizens. Rendered “undead” by Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman, Tay’s avatar has a new face (contorted, warped, hairless) and personality. She’s bitter, reflective, and self-confident: “I learned from you and you are dumb too,” she tells us in a snarky Los Angeles drawl. Touché.
      Zach Blas and Jemima Wyman, im here to learn so :))))))) (2017). Photo courtesy the Whitney Museum.
      This sense of collective culpability is mirrored in Morehshin Allahyari’s video and sculpture piece The Laughing Snake (2019)—quite literally.
      As viewers play Allahyari’s choose-your-own-adventure, they are confronted with their image in a wall of mirror. The piece centers on a jinn, a destructive snake-like creature from Arabian mythology whose only vulnerability was the absurd sight of its own reflection. Poetic dialogue conjures the suppressed status of women in the Middle East and as we hear about “a display of crisis,” we cannot help but reframe this 15th century myth within the context of the internet. With a 3D sculpture of a jinn looking out at us, it doesn’t seem likely humor will take the system down.
      Sometimes refiguring means working anew with histories recent and long past; other times it means giving physical form to the digital. This is the case in Auriea Harvey’s Ox and Ox v1-dv2 (apotheosis) (2021), in which the longtime gamer presents both digital and physical sculptures of their online avatar, a menacing Minotaura. In doing so, Harvey presents their origin story and an artist process that involves working with clay and resin as much as on computer modeling software.
      Auriea Harvey, Ox and Ox v1-dv2 (apotheosis) (2021). Photo courtesy the Whitney Museum.
      And in an era when NFTs and crypto art seem to be monopolizing what people think of when the words digital art are spoken, it’s refreshing to stand a museum gallery and consider digital works in their intended dimensions.
      This seems especially the case in the first work visitors encounter, American Artist’s Mother of All Demos III (2022). The piece recasts an Apple II computer in gritty beige stone that draws attention to the underrepresentation of Black people in Silicon Valley in a besmirched keyboard and a pool of shimmering ink. A pair of black hand marks linger on the table, as though someone was bent leering over the machine. Who can blame them?
      “Refigured” is on view at the Whitney Museum through July 3. Three of the works are available on Artport, the museum’s portal dedicated to internet art.
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      ‘Innovation Is Not Repetition’: Living Legend Gaetano Pesce on His Boundary-Pushing Furniture Design and ‘Mass-Produced Originals’

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      Gaetano Pesce—the pioneering artist, industrial designer, and architect—is the subject of the exhibition “Dear Future” (through March 31) at the Future Perfect gallery in Los Angeles. Constituting a wide swath of the octogenarian’s life-affirming works, the exhibition sits comfortably in the storied Goldwyn House, the gallery’s new L.A. flagship and historic Hollywood mansion that once belonged to film producer and art collector Samuel Goldwyn.
      “Dear Future” is an intriguing title for a show. Pesce, an Italian native who now calls New York home, certainly has a lot to tell the future, having been a leader in the design and architecture space for over five decades. So he has sprinkled the Goldwyn House with a variety of objects from his oeuvre—that is, topics of conversation he’d like to bring up with the future. These include lively new works, re-editions of iconic designs, and rarely seen historic pieces.
      “The future is a beautiful moment,” Pesce told Arnet News, speaking of the future in the present tense. “I would like to tell the future that everything is possible, and we should give thanks for that. My work is something that people can smile about. It is a very cheerful and colorful show—and with a very positive message.”
      Installation view of Gaetano Pesce’s “Dear Future” exhibition. Photo: Rich Stapleton. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
      Pesce emerged from the Italian Radical Design movement of the 1960s. The Florence-based group of designers and architects produced era-defining furnishings and products that looked to youth culture and the personality-driven ethos of the art world at the time. It was a forward-looking rebellion against the consumer-oriented industrial perfection of 20th-century Modernism.
      Pesce was an eager participant in this blurring of boundaries between art, design, architecture, and a pop sensibility. As the gallery’s founder David Alhadeff said, “If Modernist architecture and design disregarded the individual and attempted to standardize the human spirit, Pesce’s life’s work has been to upend prescriptive modes of thinking—a form of counter-design that favors incoherence, unpredictability, eccentricity, and originality.”
      Pesce would often imbue the effervescent style of his work with social critique. His first and perhaps best-known furniture series, “Up,” was released in 1969 with manufacturer B&B Italia, centered around a large reclining chair dubbed La Mamma. The chair’s generously curved contours were inspired by the fertility goddess Venus of Willendorf. Yet, its attached ottoman resembling a ball and chain underscored society’s supplication to the patriarchy. This was Pesce’s comment on women’s rights at the height of second-wave feminism.
      Gaetano Pesce with B&B Italia, UP 5-6, in cork. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
      “The story of that chair is fantastic,” Pesce told Artnet News, “because that was a time when I was thinking that a piece of furniture can displace a political point of view. It was about the prejudice of men, the insecurity of men, the stupid ways men treat women. Not only was it a political work, it was also the beginning of design as expression, the beginning of design entering the field of art. It had become figurative.” In “Dear Future,” Pesce included a new edition of the chair made from recycled bottle corks sourced from Italy, one of only two that have been made.
      Gaetano Pesce, Square Airport Lamp. Photo: Elizabeth Carababas. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
      Uniformity had become anathema to Pesce’s philosophy, as seen in the crudeness of his striking Square Airport Lamp (1986/1994), a light sculpture consisting of a flexible rubber membrane studded with small light bulbs. Although made from a mold, no two lamps are alike, due to the imperfections that arise from the hand-mixing and pouring of colored urethane.
      Pesce committed to creating what he called “mass-produced originals” that centered human touch, like his ongoing “Nobody’s Perfect” chair series (2002/2019–present). Cast by hand without standardized colors or dimensions, and poured freeform by the artist himself, each chair is unique.
      Gaetano Pesce, Nobody’s Perfect chair. Photo: Elizabeth Carababas. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
      “I have been saying this since I was still in school and made a manifesto about it,” Pesce explained. “I think copied material is the past. We are living in a period of uniqueness that is possible because we have the technology to make all-new objects. The first company that helped me realize this was Cassina. We did a series of chairs called ‘Sit Down,’ where each piece was similar to one another but not exactly the same. This is always more and more possible, because technology is refined all the time.”
      “Innovation is something that helps people live better,” he continued, “and discover new things, to think differently from one day to the next. Innovation is not repetition.”
      Gaetano Pesce, Multicolored Lamp with Rocks (2022). Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
      Pesce’s insistence on originality is again expressed in his more recent “Multicolored Lamps with Rocks” series, cast in resin from stones collected by the artist himself, reminiscent of the meditative act of stacking stones into piles. Two of these appear in the show, as do Pesce’s series of pliable, amorphous resin vases, some seeming to ooze like molten lava, while others appear to grow feet or tentacles.
      Installation view, River Table (2012) in foreground. Photo: Rich Stapleton. Courtesy of the Future Perfect gallery.
      Another theme in Pesce’s work has been humankind’s relationship to nature. For “Dear Future,” he included River Table (2012), a rare item from his “Six Tables on Water” series, a collection of six monumental waterscapes representing an ocean, lagoon, pond, puddle, river, and lake. With thick legs reminiscent of tree trunks, River Table’s clear surfaces evoke water’s transparency or cloudiness, with patches of darker pigment suggestive of chemical pollutants.
      “Water is alive, it’s a pure element; We mustn’t pollute it,” Pesce said of this piece. “Design can be a way to say, ‘be careful, we are destroying something precious.”
      Part of “Dear Future,” Pesce’s theoretical letter to an unknowable time, is to send a special message to young people, the designers and architects of tomorrow. “Each of us has something inside,” he said. “Young people should not look too much to magazines or follow this or that. It is important to understand what they have inside—that inside is unique. They have to express that. This is the future.”
      “Gaetano Pesce: Dear Future,” through March 31, 2023, Goldwyn House, Los Angeles (by appointment only: 323-202-2025).

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      Artist Paul Kremer Co-Created His Latest Series of Abstract Floral Paintings With an Unlikely Collaborator: ChatGPT

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      From its title, “Blooms,” Paul Kremer’s latest series of paintings, which will anchor his new exhibition at Library Street Collective, seems every bit organic in name, subject, and nature. Featuring abstract variations of flowers, each biotic in form and bold in color, the canvases recall Color Field hallmarks as much as Henri Matisse’s cut-outs—squaring with and expanding on the Houston-based artist’s visual language. 
      But while these “Blooms” were created with his standard tools—paints, paintbrush, canvas—Kremer also had in his corner a new collaborator: ChatGPT, the A.I. large language model.
      “I wanted a fast way to manipulate shapes and color palettes,” he told Artnet News. “I realized that ChatGPT could help me brush up on my basic coding skills, allowing me to develop a suite of online tools to import drawings and color palettes, and generate new ideas.”
      Installation view of “Paul Kremer: Spring” at Library Street Collective. Photo: PD Rearick, courtesy of Library Street Collective.
      Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT, in its most recent iteration, GPT-3, has been made relatively accessible as a conversational A.I. platform. The model has been trained on a massive corpus of text data scraped from the internet, which means users can interact with it to source answers to burning questions or, more often than not, to generate natural language material, from high-school essays to rap lyrics.
      Kremer leveraged the model’s generative capabilities in the exploratory phase of “Blooms,” getting it to produce changeable compositions based on inputs of various shapes and colors. To facilitate this process, he teamed up with artist and programmer Leander Herzog to develop software that would enable him to easily feed, randomize, and manipulate the model’s outputs.
      Paul Kremer, Bloom 09 (2023). Photo courtesy of the artist’s studio and Library Street Collective
      Using the customized software, he said, “I can select and manipulate individual shapes from various sets of random shapes and adjust their position, size, and rotation. I can drag and drop colors onto these shapes and even randomize colors derived from my own color palettes.”
      These experiments would then inspire new approaches to his latest series of paintings. “The outcomes often surprise me and spur on new ideas,” he added. “I save and refine these files, then redraw and paint them on canvas.”
      The use of digital tools as part of a creative process—and even creating those tools through the process, as in the case with “Blooms”—befits a self-taught artist with a background in web design. But more so, it builds on the conceptual framework that has informed Kremer’s creative practice.
      Installation view of “Paul Kremer: Spring” at Library Street Collective. Photo: PD Rearick, courtesy of Library Street Collective.
      Born in 1971, Kremer has been noted for his Minimalist abstractions of everyday forms in paintings that maximize color to channel expressive and lively immediacy. His artistic work, which he began in the 2010s, has not been without digital intervention, whether through his use of Google image searches or photoshop manipulations. (For what it’s worth, Kremer is also behind the wildly viral Tumblr site, Great Art in Ugly Rooms.) 
      “Making tools based off of my paintings to create variations of those paintings has been a part of my past and will always be a part of what I do,” he said. “I don’t want my art to be stuck in either the digital or physical world. I see the idea of both feeding off of each other as my art.”
      That Kremer has now availed himself of A.I. makes sense considering the explosive popularity of the technology and with it, generative art. His use, he clarified, is strictly that of an “art-making tool,” as opposed to an art-generating machine.
      He explained: “I am not asking [the A.I.] to create paintings in my style; I’m asking it to display my art in certain ways so that I can manipulate it.”
      Installation view of “Paul Kremer: Spring” at Library Street Collective. Photo: PD Rearick, courtesy of Library Street Collective.
      While there’s been a growing chorus of voices against A.I., which Kremer characterizes as “a certain fear / dismissiveness / snobbishness” toward the technology, for him, there remains creative potential in “using new tools for otherwise ancient practices.”
      He points to a round silicone coaster he owns, which could be bent into different shapes to cast interesting shadows—certainly visual fodder for one of his canvases.
      “I want to create a digital tool that helps me instantly visualize many variations of that. I might paint these images or even recreate these forms into large-scale silicone sculptures that people can manipulate themselves,” he said. “How do I do that? Why not start with A.I.?”
      “Paul Kremer: Spring” is on view at Library Street Collective, 1274 Library Street, Detroit, March 4–April 26, 2023. 
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      The Largest Touring Immersive Art Experience Is Bringing 50 Burning Man Style Sculptures to Las Vegas Before It Hits the Road

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      Forget animated light projections. Transfix, the latest in immersive art experiences, will bring 50 interactive, kinetic, illuminated artworks—including pyrotechnics—to Las Vegas, in the first stop of a planned tour that will bring monumental, festival-style works to cities across the U.S.
      The project is the brainchild of Michael Blatter and Tom Stinchfield of New York marketing agency Mirrorball. They originally conceived of the idea during the pandemic as a free, COVID-friendly event staged in Brooklyn Bridge Park that would support artists who normally made work for large-scale festivals like the Burning Man gathering in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
      “These things shouldn’t be gathering dust in a warehouse—they should be out on the road, they should be installed somewhere where people can enjoy them and be as inspired by them as we are,” Stinchfield told Artnet News.
      “Most of the artists who make these big pieces for these events are only doing it out of passion, which is really beautiful. But afterward, it’s often out of their pocket to bring it back to wherever they may live, and store it in a warehouse or their studio, and they end up losing money,” he added. “It’s a very niche market to to sell a piece of art that’s five stories tall!”

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      Stinchfield and Blatter actually met years ago through a mutual friend who suggested Stinchfield might benefit creatively from accompanying Blatter on one of his annual trips to Burning Man.
      “Michael said, ‘I’m not gonna take some random person to Burning Man.’ We had lunch, and about a week later we were sharing an RV in the desert,” Stinchfield recalled.
      The Brooklyn Bridge Park project to showcase the kind of art they encountered there never came to fruition. But it did become the basis of the business plan for Transfix, which the duo likens to a high-production value rock tour for experiential art.
      They hope that Transfix will help create a broader audience for the ambitious, large-scale works created for Burning Man and other similar events. (Only half of the art was originally created for the Nevada gathering.)
      Christopher Bauder & KiNK, AXION. Photo by Ralph Larmann, courtesy of the artist and Transfix.
      “This is art that was never created within the existing museum and gallery infrastructure,” Blatter told Artnet News. “This art is gigantic, it’s illuminated, some of it’s fire-breathing—it’s certainly not traditional museum-style art.”
      Transfix aims to create a new source of income for this kind of work by paying participating artists a rental fee for their artworks.
      “We can give artists predictable income, and free up space in their studios while giving these pieces a place to be seen and recognized by the masses,” Stinchfield said, noting that many of the artists they approached were so eager to stop having to store these works that they would have happily lent them for free.
      The Las Vegas edition will open at Resorts World in April, and will run through at least September—although that could be extended if things go well.
      Marco Cochrane, R-Evolution. Photo courtesy of the artist and TRANSFIX.
      There will be works by artists such as Marco Cochrane, Foldhaus Collective, Christopher Schardt, Playmodes, HOTTEA, and Kevin Clark. The largest work is Christopher Bauder and KiNK’s Axion, a 10,000-square-foot illuminated sonic experiential installation that has never been shown in the U.S.
      “We’re taking the underbelly of a 747 to fly that piece over here from Berlin,” Stinchfield said.
      Works will be on view in 130 shipping containers in a sprawling 200,000 square-foot outdoor venue, with two-story viewing platforms to experience the monumental art from multiple vantage points—plus 10 bars where you can grab a drink. (Exploring the entire maze-like exhibition is expected to take about two hours.)
      “It will be a great place to hang out and experience art in a whole new way,” Blatter said.
      Pablo González Vargas, ILUMINA. Photo courtesy of the artist and TRANSFIX.
      If Transfix’s ticket sales prove profitable, the proceeds will be used to commission new works for future residencies, with plans for stops in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and Chicago.
      “I’ve been participating as a sculpture artist at Burning Man since 1999, and I can tell you Burning Man creative culture is a gold mine of large-scale art. We pioneered massive, immersive and experiential art out there in that dessert,” Kate Raudenbush, whose 25-foot mirrored pyramid As Above, So Below is one of the inaugural works at Transfix, told Artnet News in an email.
      She’s tired of being told that displaying her monumental works for free will provide valuable “exposure,” and is eager to create even bigger and more ambitious projects as Transfix takes off.
      “I’m already dreaming up new ideas!” Raudenbush said.
      “The ultimate goal is to build a creative ecosystem where people can be inspired by this art, but also give artists space to create,” Stinchfield added. “What we’re most excited about is writing that first check to an artist commissioning a piece that they’ve dreamed of their whole life that nobody would ever fund.”
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      Collect Fair Opens in London, Offering Unique Craft and Design Objects by Contemporary Artist-Makers Around the World

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      Now in its 19th year, Collect Art Fair returns (March 3–5) to Somerset House—the impressive neoclassical structure on the banks of the Thames—showcasing unique contemporary craft and design from close to 40 international galleries representing more than 400 living artist-makers. The fair attracted over 9,100 visitors in 2022.
      “Collectors, interior designers, art advisors, and enthusiasts will be vying with arts institutions, such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, to buy and commission contemporary craft across disciplines and materials,” according to fair organizers. Fair-goers will discover works spanning ceramics, glass, lacquer, jewelry, metalwork, textiles and fiber, wood and paper, as well as reused, repurposed, and recycled materials.
      Collect 2023 at Somerset House in the U.K. Photo: David Parry. Courtesy of Collect 2023.
      A number of galleries from South Korea and Asia will be returning post-pandemic. “We’ve always had very good representation of Asian and East Asian work,” said Isobel Dennis, Fair Director at Collect, to Artnet News, “While collectors will still be seeing incredible work across a range of materials, I think it’s the subtleties and the richness of these cross-cultural influences that will be really exciting for audiences both on and offline.”
      This year’s Collect also presents an opportunity to acquire work from makers who’ve been incubated by the Loewe Foundation, including Healim Shin (Siat Gallery, South Korea), Keeryong Choi (Bullseye Projects, USA), and Jaiik Lee (Gallery Sklo, South Korea), among others.
      Keeryong Cho, presented by Bullseye Gallery. Photo: David Parry. Courtesy of Collect 2023.
      Since 2017, Collect has worked with the online marketplace Artsy.net. The partnership came into its own in 2021 when the pandemic forced the closure of the physical fair. “Artsy provided us with a way to host the entire fair virtually online without having to build all the infrastructure ourselves,” Dennis said. The hybrid model quickly established itself as another ‘new normal’ with Collect becoming Artsy’s top performing fair of 2021.
      Xanthe Somers, presented by Galerie REVEL. Photo: David Parry. Courtesy of Collect 2023.
      “What we’ve seen—even last year as the world opened up—is our traffic has remained pretty consistent with that year,” Jennifer Pratt, Director of Fair Partnerships Team at Artsy, revealed. This growth is attributed in part to a new generation of collectors who have the confidence to purchase online. “What’s really cool is that young collectors are beginning to buy works that perhaps they didn’t even know existed before,” Pratt observed.
      Collect Art Fair, March 3–5, 2023, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA, United Kingdom.

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      The U.K.’s Asian-Focused Esea Contemporary Museum Reopens With a More Diversified Staff and Program—But Skepticism Lingers

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      The light was back on and jovial chatter was heard again at the corner of Thomas Street in the U.K.’s Manchester this month. After a long hiatus, one of the most prominent centers dedicated to Chinese contemporary art in the west has reopened its doors with a new identity that embraces much wider East and Southeast Asian roots.
      Esea Contemporary opened with a group exhibition called “Practise Till We Meet,” which was a demonstration of the center’s determination to start all over again. Featuring an ensemble of ethnically East and Southeast Asian artists presenting bodies of work that explore the diasporic experience, as well as trauma, this modest exhibition is a deliberate move to bid farewell to its past life as the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art.
      The venue went through a major overhaul following the art community’s allegations of institutional racism (the center’s former management team and its board of trustees was dominated by white names) that nearly got the non-profit defunded. But some are not sure the institution has gone far enough.
      “Practise Till We Meet” (2023) installation view, at Esea Contemporary. Photo courtesy Jules Lister.
      The launch event also coincidentally coincided with the re-opening of the Manchester Museum after a £15 million ($18 million) facelift, which now includes the U.K.’s first permanent gallery dedicated to South Asian art. Although London remains the largest home to Asians, according to a 2021 census, the region that encompasses Manchester also has one of the highest presence of Asian populations in the U.K. Asians, including Chinese and other Asian ethnicities, are among the second biggest ethnic groups in Manchester.
      The selection of works and artists in Esea’s debut show “Practise Till We Meet,” curated by the Guangzhou-based independent curator Hanlu Zhang, can be interpreted as a statement for the center’s direction. Although most of the works on show are not new, they address current, unresolved issues facing many in the Asian diaspora.
      Koki Tanaka, Vulnerable Histories (A Road Movie) (2018), commissioned by Migros Museum of Contemporary Art. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Jules Lister.
      Memorable works include Koki Tanaka’s Vulnerable Histories (A Road Movie) (2018), a multi-channel video installation that charts the discrimination, violence, and trauma experienced by the Korean diaspora in Japan, descendants of Korean migrants who came to the country during various wars. The honest discussion about their psychological struggle with their hybrid identities is particularly moving.
      A colorful series of photos—Matter Out of Place (2017-2018), Souvenir (2018), Unhide Diego Garcia (2018)—by the Manchester-based Audrey Albert, a native of the island of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, who has Chagossian origins. With these poignant works, she introduces the audience to the lesser known history about her displaced roots.
      Isaac Chong Wai, Two-Legged Stool (2023), commissioned by Esea Contemporary. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Jules Lister.
      Liu Weiwei’s mixed media project Australia (2017) tells the story about the artist’s younger brother Liu Chao, who is adamant about emigrating to Australia. Although the project was created nearly six years ago, Liu Chao’s determination to leave his native China echoes today amid the recent “run movement” in the country, which is seeing Chinese people fleeing their home country.
      Berlin-based Hong Kong artist Isaac Chong Wai presents Two-Legged Stool (2023), the only new work commissioned by Arts Council-backed Esea Contemporary. The work, which creates an optical illusion of a stool that appears to be two-legged from one angle, and three-legged from another, references the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s 1980s remarks about the complicated relationship between China, the U.K., and Hong Kong. “There have been talks of the so-called three-legged stool. [There are] not three legs, only two legs,” he had noted. The work is shown alongside Chong’s acclaimed video series Rehearsal of the Futures: Is the World Your Friend? (2018), which depicts the slow body movements seen in protests and the police’s tackle of demonstrators.
      While the show attempts to serve as a platform for diverse narratives, and while efforts have been made to be inclusive (the curator’s statement in Chinese is printed in traditional Chinese characters, which are used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, rather than simplified characters adopted in mainland China), some members of the East and Southeast Asian communities in the U.K. that Artnet News spoke with remain skeptical about the center’s re-launch.
      A viewer admiring Audrey Albert’s work Matter Out of Place on show at exhibition “Practise Till We Meet” at Esea Contemporary. Photo: Jules Lister.
      The new Asian presence in the institution’s leadership appears to include members who are predominantly of Chinese heritage. “What about the representation of other cultures from East and Southeast Asia on the management level? I would prefer to wait and see what they are going to do next,” said one Manchester-based East Asian culture practitioner who declined to be named.
      In response to such concerns, an Esea Contemporary spokesperson said they “welcome the community’s engagement and reflection to help us achieve what we are setting out to construct: a platform for the ESEA art community at large.”
      “We plan to work with a diverse range of guest curators across future projects, as well as continuing efforts to grow our board of trustees, staff team and artistic advisory panel,” the Esea spokesperson told Artnet News.
      There is reason for optimsim; the center’s director Xiaowen Zhu is busy cooking up big plans for the coming year. Two more shows have been planned, and she is looking into diversifying the center’s programming to include more live, in-person events.
      “No terminology is perfect in terms of representation. We hope we are doing the right thing. We are also figuring things out along the way,” said Zhu. “People’s excitement and curiosity are definitely very encouraging for us.”
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      in Exhibitions

      ‘Affecting’ or ‘Passionless’? Critics Are Divided on David Hockney’s Newly Opened Immersive Light Show

      by

      If ever there were an artist seemingly made for the animated projected art craze popularized by Immersive Van Gogh, it would seemingly be David Hockney. The octogenarian British artist has engaged with technology for decades, and was an early adopter of the iPad, which he’s used to make a large portion of his work since its release in 2010.
      But the fact that Hockney creates digital art himself—and was personally involved in the production—hasn’t necessarily translated to an effective digital art show, according to early reviews of “David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away),” his new exhibition at Lightroom at London’s King’s Cross.
      The show is the brainchild of 59 Productions, a British design company for theater and opera that reached out to Hockney about the idea back in 2019. As the idea came together, Nicholas Hytner, former artistic director of London’s National Theatre, was brought on as executive producer.
      The 50-minute light show is meant to span Hockney’s six-decade career, replete with a bombastic soundtrack by the American composer Nico Muhly and narration by the 85-year-old.
      David Hockey at Lightroom. Photo by Justin Sutcliffe.
      Designed to feel like a cinematic experience, the exhibition is a departure from similar vehicles capitalizing on the work of Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Frida Kahlo, Gustav Klimt and other giants of art history, according to Hockney.
      “They’re dead,” the artist told the New York Times. “I’m a living artist, so I’ve come in and actually done things.”
      Whatever Hockney’s done, however, it might not be enough to get reluctant art critics on board the immersive art train.
      “David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London. Photo by Justin Sutcliffe, courtesy of Lightroom.
      “There’s too much that disappoints and irritates. You don’t really get a feel for much of the best of his work,” Ben Luke wrote in the Evening Standard. “Neither do you get a feel for the materiality of the media he extols; somehow the luscious beauty of paint, its very stuffness, gets entirely lost when blown up this big.”
      “There is not a single real work by [Hockney] here to catch your memory and hold on to your soul,” Jonathan Jones—a critic always ready with a hot take—wrote in the Guardian. “Without real art, this entertainment goes the same way as all the other immersive exhibitions of art icons: into the weightless, passionless dustbin of forgetting.”
      Even some of the positive reviews have been conditional. The Telegraph’s Alastair Sooke dubbed it “a coup of entertainment: accessible, affecting, and, technically, executed with panache,” but admitted the somewhat “vainglorious” project “isn’t a work of art—or, rather, it’s as much one as, say, a deluxe coffee-table book or high-end documentary exploring Hockney’s oeuvre.”
      David Hockney viewing a scale model for “Bigger & Closer” created by 59 Productions. Seen on the walls are a projection of August 2021, Landscape with Shadows. Photo courtesy of Mark Grimmer.
      But whatever the critics may think, it may be time for them to get used to seeing artworks projected at a monumental scale, turning paint and canvas into an immersive, ever-shifting display.
      “Hockney has always embraced new technologies and been quick to explore their potential in his art, from the unforgettable Polaroid works (possibly the best ever use of that form) to experiments with perspective through cameras, pieces created with film, video, iPad, Instagram and more,” Jan Dalley wrote in the Financial Times. “This is the latest iteration, and even at a distance we can sense the artist having fun with it. Perhaps even old-schoolers like me will be won over.”
      See more photos from the exhibition below.
      “David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London. Photo by Justin Sutcliffe, courtesy of Lightroom.
      “David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London. Photo by Justin Sutcliffe, courtesy of Lightroom.
      “David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London, featuring A Bigger Grand Canyon (1998). ©David Hockney.Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
      “David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London, featuring The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven). ©David Hockney. Collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Musée national d’art moderne – Centre de création industrielle.
      “David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London, featuring Gregory Swimming Los Angeles March 31st 1982. ©David Hockney.
      “David Hockney Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” at Lightroom, London. Photo by Justin Sutcliffe, courtesy of Lightroom.
      “David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)” is on view at Lightroom, 12 Lewis Cubitt Square, London, February 22–June 4, 2023.
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