Installation at Bratsera Hotel, Hydra, Greece Dimensions Variable 2006
I was invited to Hydra in Greece in 2006 by curator Dimitrios Antonitsis to make a project on the island. I chose a beautiful olive tree with a smooth surface and wrote on it the Heart Sutra, a Buddhist text that I have memorized since growing up in Taiwan about impermanence. Since the climate of the island is very dry, the characters remained and continued to grow with the natural growth of the tree for a few more years after the project has been completed.
Lovely Daze Issue #3: When I Am Alone, Everything Is So Surreal, revisits André Breton’s almost-century-old Surrealist Manifesto* with a collection of artists’ writings and artworks.
*In the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, Breton defined the term surrealism as: Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, or in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.
Publisher/Editor/Designer ~ Charwei Tsai Editors ~ Kelly Carmena, Lesley Ma, and Sabrina Shaffer Contributors ~ Rita Ackermann, AA Bronson, Santiago Cucullu, David Kennedy-Cutler, Andrea Galvani, N.s. Harsha, Federico Herrero, James Hoff, Jungil Hong, Lee Mingwei, Justin Lowe, Jean-Lou Majerus, Cristina Rodriguez, Julian Seidl, Eyeam Soreel, and Su-mei Tse Cover ~ Andrea Galvani, la morte di un’immagine #5, 2005 copyright ~ lovely daze, fall 2006
RITA ACKERMANN was born in Budapest. She immigrated to the US for an education in pop in 1991 and has lived and worked in New York since.
AA BRONSON lived and worked as one of the three artists of General Idea from 1969 through 1994 when his two partners died. He now lives and works as a solo artist in New York City, and also as the Director of Printed Matter, Inc., an artists’ bookstore.
www.aabronson.com
KELLY CARMENA was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and now lives in New York City.
SANTIAGO CUCULLU was born in 1969 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and currently lives in Milwaukee. Recent solo exhibitions include a new project at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Group exhibitions include: the 2006 Singapore Biennale, the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
DAVID KENNEDY-CUTLER was born in Sandgate, Vermont in 1979. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
www.niceandfitgallery.com
ANDREA GALVANI was born in Verona in 1973 and currently lives and works in Bologna and Milan, Italy. He has participated in many exhibitions in Italy and abroad, including his recent retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Monfalcone, Gorizia, Italy.
N.S. HARSHA was born in 1969 and currently lives and works in Mysore, India. Recent exhibitions include Singapore Biennale; The Artist Lives and Works at The House of World Cultures, Berlin in 2006; Indian Summer at L’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, Paris in 2005; Another Passage to India at Ethnography Museum, Geneva, Switzerland; Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India at Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Australia, Asia Society, and Queens Museum of Art, New York, USA in 2004.
FEDERICO HERRERO was born in 1978 in San José, Costa Rica where he currently lives and works. He studied painting at Pratt Institute, New York from 1997-1998. He has exhibited at Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice in 2006; Aichi EXPO in Japan in 2005; Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris, curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist in 2002; and 49th Venice Biennale, curated by Harald Szeemann, where he received the young artist’s prize in 2001.
JAMES HOFF is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn, New York.
JUNGIL HONG was born in Seoul, Korea. Jung’s favorite pastime was sneaking into a peanut field and eating raw peanuts from the ground. In 1986, the Hong family moved to suburban New Jersey, where they spent weekends fishing in a murky canal next to Highway 1. Jung currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island, watching Hawks on temple tops and waiting patiently for DJ Jazzy Jess’ mixtape.
LEE MINGWEI was born in Taiwan and currently lives in New York City and San Francisco. Lee was raised in a dual Buddhist-Catholic background. As a child, he spent his summers at a Chan (the Chinese ancestor of Zen) monastery where he learned the simple power of concentrating on daily activities. Lee eventually moved to the US and attended a Benedictine high school in California. He earned a BFA in Textile Arts from the California College of Arts in 1993, and an MFA in New Genre Public Art from Yale University in 1997.
www.leemingwei.com
JUSTIN LOWE was born in 1976 and currently lives and works in New York City. He received a MFA from Columbia University in 2004 and a BFA from Hampshire College in 2000. Solo exhibitions include Helter Swelter at Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery, New York, 2006; Collecting Pictures in the Brain Hotel at Sculpture Center, Long Island City, 2005; and Waterfall at The Wrong Gallery, New York, 2004.
LESLEY MA is fascinated, distracted, and inspired by Texas.
JEAN-LOU MAJEURS is a teacher based in Luxembourg. He leads an educational program at the Luxembourg penitentiaries. He has a passion for 20th-century furniture design as well as for the arts. He often works in close collaboration with Su-Mei Tse.
CRISTINA RODRIGUEZ is a Colombian artist and designer living in New York City. She received a BFA in Industrial Design at the Rhode Island School of Design and recently finished a year of Fashion Design at Parsons New School of Design. She is currently designing textile prints, working on her drawings during her free time, and preparing for her third illustrated travel book project in India and Bhutan.
JULIAN SEIDL lives and works in New York. She graduated from Hampshire College in 2000 in Art and Photography. Selected exhibitions include: On The Beach at Printed Matter, and The Image-World at the International Center of Photography in New York.
SABRINA SHAFFER is preparing for her return to (and Charwei’s departure from) New York City.
www.otabo.com
EYEAM SOREEL is a poet, an artist, and a critic based in Urk. His work has received wide international acclaim and he has exhibited and “exposed himself” as he prefers to call it- in some of the world’s leading galleries. His last massive show, Nueva Galería Difusión, in October 2002, Bogotá, was controversially shut down by Colombian authorities after failing a supposed health inspection. “Soreel might be the last true artist to understand that in order to make the inner the outer, matter must be modified”, as Colombian author Juan Carlos Donado has said about Soreel’s work. “In what seems to be the last attempt to truly address the issue of representation (Vorstellen), Soreel immerses the spectator in a network of references that aim to underscore what I have otherwise referred to as pathology,” stated philosopher Roy Ben Shai has recently stated in the journal Cinemaesthetics (No. 17, Spring/Summer 2006). Notwithstanding the anathema cast upon him by the artistic community –his last conference in New York ended when the audience booed Soreel off the stage for his notion of Bedford Design/Entertainment – the artist has decided to publish yet one more time.
CHARWEI TSAI enjoys riding her bike around Thompkin’s Square Park where friendly neighbors and cute dogs hang out. She now looks forward to joining her first artist’s residency in Paris on New Year’s Day in 2007. And though she does not enjoy bread and cheese so much and prefers authentic Taiwanese beef noodle soup, (especially from Lai Lai where she hangs out exclusively) she will stick faithfully to her fortuneteller’s words and remain confident that 2007 will be another amazing one.
www.charwei.com
SU-MEI TSE is an artist based in Luxembourg and Paris. She uses various media (videos, photographs, installations, objects…) in function of the core idea she wants to express. Sound, rhythm, and music are also important components in her work, which are characterized by a placing in suspension, moments of silence, and an invitation to a degree of introspection. Su-Mei’s work has recently been exhibited at Peter Blum Gallery, PS1 in New York, Albion Gallery in London, and at Casino, Forum d’Art Contemporain in Luxembourg.
~ special thanks to grandma, mom, dad, sis, keisuke, lots of aunts&uncles&cousins. sabrina, lesley, kelly, tina, sarah, ama, cristina, angelita, grigoris, faustina, terresa, marat, bebe, irene, ronnie+duke+ jason+eugene+ryan+johan+gang, lewis, juan carlos, ana maria, maria, fabrizio, yulin jie, mingwei, su-mei, jean-lou, susan, aude, andy, yoko, jason, chris liu, yonatan, alex, shunyi, nigel, adam, danny, leif, pat, and max chen. howie, whitney at altria, rita, lizzi, julien, hisham, jorge, lansing-dreiden, dan, aa, max, julian, justin, rachel, james, cat, printed matter, dimitrios, dave, nice&fit, andrea, cai+studio, federico, santi, harsha, sb2006 staff, jung, the artists’ galleries, taipei lai lai sheraton, and of course, most of all, and again, all the contributors!
Lovely Daze is a collection of artists’ writings and artworks published twice a year in limited editions. The second issue, “Take A Stroll,” inspired by presocratic philosophers, takes a fleet away from daily routines through earth, water, and air.
AZRA AKšAMIJA is an artist and architect based in Cambridge, USA. Since the fall of 2004, she has been affiliated with MIT as a Ph.D. student in the Department for History Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture (AKPIA). She graduated from the Technical University Graz, Austria in 2001, and received her M.Arch from Princeton University, USA in 2004. Her work has been widely published and exhibited in venues such as the Generali Foundation Vienna (2002), Biennial de Valencia (2003), Graz Biennial of Media and Architecture (2003), Gallery for Contemporary Art Leipzig (2003), and Liverpool Biennial (2004).
http://web.mit.edu/azra/www/Research.htm
JESSE ALEXANDER is co-founder of CrumleyAlexander creative agency and the sole proprietor of JeromeJerome silk scarves. His works have been exhibited at Bergdorf Goodman, Printed Matter, Gavin Brown, the nac in Portland, Youngblood Gallery in Atlanta, Saltworks in Atlanta, and a nondescript venue in Los Angeles.
DIMITRIOS ANTONITSIS was born in 1966, in Athens, Greece. He had solo exhibitions in New York, Athens, Italy, and Germany. He is a keen observer of the most insane pockets of society and himself. According to his personal trainer ‘he is the ultimate modern man, tormented by the painful awareness that his pleasures are finite, but his needs infinite.’ Every summer he curates an international art show at the old school on the island of Hydra, his favorite place on Earth.
AARON BENNETT is an art teacher in Cambridge, MA. He recommends Finn Comforts as the best overall walking shoes. They’re totally worth the money.
THE BREAD&PUPPET THEATER was founded in 1963 on New York City’s Lower East Side by Silesian-born sculptor and choreographer Peter Schumann. After a four-year residency at Goddard College, the Theater moved to their permanent home on a farm in Glover in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont in 1974. Until 1998, an annual performance known as Our Domestic Resurrection Circus was held at the farm in late August, drawing crowds of up to 40,000. Now the Theater produces a lively ongoing summer season from June through the end of August with the help of an internship company. During the rest of the year, The Bread&Puppet Theater tours its indoor shows and massive outdoor spectacles in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. Their pageants have a broad theme-oriented appeal to large non-elite audiences. They address social, political, and environmental issues, or simply the common urgencies of our lives.
www.breadandpuppet.org
KELLY CARMENA made another rock cake today.
ALEX DODGE is a New York-based artist working in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He recently had his first solo exhibition at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in Williamsburg. His work concerns the fragility and transitory nature of personal experience, working in a wide range of materials and processes. His works are in numerous private collections in the US and Europe. He co-curated the exhibition “Greater Brooklyn” with Glen Baldridge at CRG Gallery in New York, a show devoted to unrepresented artists living and working in Brooklyn.
www.alexdodge.com
JUAN CARLOS DONADO is a Colombian writer.
SARAH DUNBAR is a student at MIT’s School of Architecture. Before coming to MIT, she collaborated with Logan Billingham on an art and music project, Cat Pants – channeling the feline mind for all to appreciate.
MAX GLEASON graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 2002 with a BFA in sculpture. For the past three years, he has worked in New York City in the film and television industry, both in art departments and post-production capacities. He continues to work as a painter and video artist at his studio in Williamsburg. His paintings, sculptures, and video works have been exhibited in New York, Providence, Boston, and Atlanta.
www.maxgleason.com
BUTT JOHNSON does not exist. If he did, however, he might spend his days playing Nintendo on his computer and his nights listening to books on tape. He would also probably live and work in Brooklyn, New York.
www.buttjohnson.com
AUDE JOMINI is a Swiss artist who relocated to the US in 1993. She lived in Boca Raton, Florida, before attending the Rhode Island School of Design. Aude has participated in group exhibitions in West Palm Beach, Boca Raton, Providence, Brooklyn, and New York. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work utilizes the American built environment as a starting point; to create alternate constructions within the pictorial plane; or to denounce and emphasize certain social issues arising in the spaces and landscapes inhabited.
PALI KASHI is an artist living, working, and showing in New York. She has always had a deep yearning sensation to become a gypsy.
IAN KAZANOWSKI is an Architect. Born in 1979 in the United States, currently a resident of Brooklyn, NY. His drawings are his tools to create large-scale constructed works. His work focuses on the conceptual gradation of visual interests and occupational needs.
CATALINA LEóN was born in Buenos Aires in April, 1981. She started painting in 1998, but just for a short time. She really started in 2001 and spent some time in the Prilidiano Pueyrredon Fine Arts School, IUNA in 2002 where a very close friend of hers, Mariana López, became her teacher. In 2003, she was selected to participate in the Workshop Programa de Talleres para las Artes Visuales CCRRojas – UBA / Kuitca, a grant for young visual artists, and studied with Guillermo Kuitca for two years. She currently lives and works in Buenos Aires.
MARIANA LóPEZ is an Argentinean painter who lives and works in Buenos Aires. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2005 and had solo shows in Argentina and recently in New York.
LESLEY MA looks forward to the LD2 launch, her next brunch, and working on her own zine this summer. She misses chitchatting with Charwei at the studio.
ZOë MENDELSON creates drawn and painted dreamscapes occurring on walls, inside antique furniture, and museum-style cabinets. With conflicting roots in children’s illustration, botanical and erotic drawing, her dislocated narratives play off intimations of desire with sensations of disgust and discomfort. She has exhibited widely in Europe, with recent solo shows at Galerie Schleicher + Lange, Paris (2004, 2006), Rokeby, London (2005); Millais Gallery, Southampton (2005); Mogadishni, Copenhagen (2006) and Galerie Kapinos, Berlin (2006). Zoë teaches at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design and lives in London.
www.zoemendelson.co.uk
PAPER RAD is based in Easthampton, MA, and Pittsburgh, PA. They make music, cartoons, installations, and comics, and often take their show on the road. They recently finished a book called BJ and Da Dogz, and they have a website with many cool files called “www.paperrad.org.”
CRISTINA RODRIGUEZ is a Colombian designer/artist living in New York. She received her BFA in industrial design from the Rhode Island School of Design and is currently extending her studies in fashion design at the Parsons School of Design. As long as she can remember, she has obsessively kept journals and sketchbooks to record everything from people to places to ideas.
SABRINA SHAFFER continues to contribute (and greatly enjoys the conversation resulting from) her adverse evaluations of Charwei.
www.otabo.com
CHARWEI TSAI’s apartment in the East Village is still very messy even though she has a lot of time on her hands now. But the artist has a good life and looks forward to her next exhibitions on the island of Hydra in Greece where Leonard Cohen hangs out and at Singapore’s first Biennale. Her fortuneteller says that 2006 is an even luckier year than 2005. It is a little hard to believe, but it seems to be true indeed.
www.charwei.com
SU-MEI TSE is an artist based in Luxembourg and Paris. She uses different media (videos, photographs, installations, objects…) the function of the core idea she wants to express. Sound, rhythm, and music are also important components in her work, which is characterized by a placing in suspension, moments of silence, and an invitation to a degree of introspection. Su-Mei’s work has been exhibited at the 50th Venice Biennial, at the Sao Paolo Biennial, at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, Casino, Forum d’Art Contemporain in Luxembourg, and BMoCA in Kinmen, Taiwan.
JORDAN WOLFSON was born in New York City on October 9th, 1980. He currently lives and works in both NYC and Berlin Germany. Recent exhibitions include the 2006 Whitney Biennial, Kunsthalle Zurich, Yvon Lambert Paris, and Uncertain States of America at the Astrup Fernely Museum of Modern Art.
ANDREW JEFFREY WRIGHT is a current and founding member of Philadelphia’s Space 1026 art space. He has a BFA in animation.
DIEGO YTURBE is an artist based in Mexico. After a long stroll around the world, he left his rigid and structured civil engineering background to explore the lawless world of art. His last work was about the hospitality that he received throughout his journey and it was exhibited at Mas Arte Contemporaneo, México City. Diego and the visual artist, Guillermo Roel, are co-founders of an experimental art center in Oaxaca, México, called “estudio 11011.” Diego is currently working on the construction of a winery at Valle de Guadalupe in Baja, California. He is not pouring concrete anymore but is sculpting a thousand square meters of experimental land walls.
Black ink on fresh tofu and iris 50 cm x 20cm New York, USA Courtesy of the artist J’en Rêve Fondation Cartier, Paris, France. June 24 – October 9, 2005
Curators: Hervé Chandès, Hélène Kelmachter, and Leanne Sacramone.
Notes: This piece marks the beginning of the Mantra Series where I wrote a Buddhist scripture about the nature of impermanence and emptiness from memory onto ephemeral objects.
The image was from my proposal for Fondation Cartier’s young artist’s exhibition showcasing young artists who have never been exhibited and are recommended by experienced artists who have worked closely with the Fondation.
For the exhibition, fresh tofu, flower, and mushrooms are written repetitively with the scripture and installed in a small room. While the human flesh-like tofu is decaying, the flower is projected in still frame onto a glass of water, and the mushrooms are growing in the decaying soil. The text of the scripture transforms through various stages of growth and decay as it materializes from thought.
Mushroom Mantra, 2005Mushroom Mantra, 2005Tofu Mantra, 2005Iris Mantra, 2005J’en Reve artists group photo at Fondation Cartier, 2005
