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The DART BOARD: 08.18.2022

By Peggy Roalf   Thursday August 18, 2022


Continuing: Michael Lin | Pentachrome at The Met

Michael Lin’s site-specific installation Pentachrome brings contemporary art to the Museum’s Great Hall Escalator for the first time. Inspired by The Met collection and the building’s architecture, Pentachrome invites visitors to reconsider the Museum’s Great Hall, its Balcony, and the surrounding art from a fresh perspective. 

For more than a hundred years, Asian art, especially Chinese ceramics, has adorned the Museum’s Great Hall, finding a special prominence around the second-floor Balcony. As visitors travel up the escalator, they are surrounded by images of birds and flowers drawn from two Qing-dynasty porcelain vases that have been enlarged to heroic, overwhelming scale. Inspired by street poster (“wild posting”) campaigns seen in the urban landscape, Lin applies the images in a cumulative, irregular way, breaking down the formal Museum environment and inviting the casual engagement of the street. By surrounding and immersing visitors in these images, Lin invites us to look and think more deeply about the paradoxically central and sidelined role of Asian art within the history of the Museum’s Great Hall.

This just in from Mathieu Borysevicz of BANK/MABSOCIETY, who represents Lin in Shanghai:   As a public component to the work, Lin has created posters that will be distributed throughout the streets of NYC in the coming weeks.  At the September Armory Show, BANK will present Lin’s work along with that of the late Ching Ho Cheng. Also, in October during the Printed Matter Art Book Fair we will host a signing of Lin's catalog published by ZOLO Press on the occasion his installation at Museo Jumex. In October, Lin will also install a mural in the New York Taiwan Cultural Center lobby. Above: Installation at City Hall, The Hague, The Netherlands; photo courtesy of BANK/MABSOCIETY

Michael Lin grew up in LA, built his career in Europe and Asia and has represented Taiwan at the 49th Venice Biennial. He is loosely associated with 'Relational Aesthetics' as his work is meant to encourage and frame social interaction, but his is a truly conceptual endeavor, exploring painting in the expanded realms of architecture, populism, social politics and human mobility.  

He has recently completed solo projects at Museo Jumex, Mexico City; MoCA, Toronto; and a large-scale public project in Tokyo in collaboration with Atelier Bow-wow which is featured in the attached PDF of public commissions.  He has had solo shows at MoMA PS1; Palais de Tokyo; National Gallery Australia; RAM, Shanghai; Peabody Essex Museum, and the Vancouver Art Gallery among others.  

  
Powerhouse Arts, Gowanus, Brooklyn

 

The former Brooklyn Rapid Transit Powerhouse, located on the Gowanus Canal, has begun its new life as an arts manufacturing center. Purchased in 2012 by philanthropist Joshua Rechnitz, the industrial building was re-imagined by Pritzker Prize-winning architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron as a state-of-the-art space for wood, metal, ceramic, and textile fabrication, and printmaking, Built in 1904, the plant was decommissioned in the ‘50s and by the early 2000s became known as the Batcave, a graffiti-encrusted place for punks, drifters, and homeless people until they were forced out in 2006. Above: Powerhouse Arts, Gowanus, Brooklyn (Rendering © Herzog & de Meuron)

The focal point of Herzog & de Meuron’s renovation revolves around the existing Turbine Hall—following in the steps they made in renovating London’s Bankside Power Station, now Tate Modern. Here, the space was reconfigured as wood, metal, and ceramics workshops. In addition to this, the six-story boiler house which was once demolished was rebuilt.

Since 2015, the organization has been producing distinctive, technically advanced art projects for artists, non-profits, galleries, and institutions alike in various spaces . Information on recent projects by Powerhouse Arts expert fabricators is available on the Featured Projects page of its website. Above: The abandoned building, referred to as “the Batcave,” ©Abandoned/NYC by Will Ellis , courtesy of Untapped New York; below: Bruce Sherman, Earth/Heaven Heaven/Earth, 2020. Installation view. Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, NY. Courtesy of the artist

 

According to an article this week in Hyperallergic Powerhouse Arts now offers artists fee-based fabrication services in printmaking, ceramics, and large-scale public art; shared ceramics production space; and opportunities to deepen their practice through mentorship and resource sharing—all under one roof. Through an extended network of art and fabrication professionals, arts educators, and future tenants, Powerhouse functions as a collaborative hive of creative expression and production. Info


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