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orientallyyours:

In 沈少民 Shen Shaomin’s “Bonsai” series, he has created a group of sculptures using the techniques of cultivating bonsai. Inspired by foot-binding, this work speaks about violence, control, deformation, artificial transformation of nature and the body for aesthetic purposes. Shen contorts and manipulates his miniature trees through the use of metal grips, vices, braces, clamps, metal meshes and armatures, trapping the plants and inhibiting their growth, while being contained in ceramic pots labeled with poetic terms/phrases and decorated with peaceful and heavenly landscape imagery.

Wu Hung writes: “Shen Shaomin turns invisible violence into tangible forms in his Bonsai series. Bonsai makes us reconsider the brutality in daily life, particularly that which has been transformed into kinds of aesthetic perception or concealed within nature itself. This group of works achieves its efficacy not because it displays the results of these man-made transformations, but makes apparent the process of transformation itself. Shen Shaomin uses two means for achieving this. First, the bonsais themselves display a sudden halt in the “process” like a freeze-frame in a movie, where all the small trees have been imprisoned in ironware, and hang like prisoners chained and shackled. Shen Shaomin calls these works “living installations. Collectors can choose to let them return to their original state or maintain this process. Even when the bonsai dies, these installations will still record the process and mechanisms behind their transformation. The second means is through texts: every bonsai is accompanied by a meticulously designed course of study. Dense passages and illustrations record how bonsais are made, and the procedures and matters needing attention.”

Artist’s website: Shen Shaomin

Sources: Art Practical, ArtSlant

darksilenceinsuburbia:

Bohyun Yoon. Unity.

Website. More here

This is fantastic.

inrain8ows:

Gustav Klimt : The complete paintings

An amazing cover for this new book published by the great Taschen publishing company : “Klimt : the complete paintings”, 676 pages, only 150€ for this exhaustive monography of the Viennese artist… This year, we are celebrating the 150th anniversary of his birth, so this book is a also a celebration of Klimt, who died in 1918. Klimt painted 230 art work, among them 54 landscapes. His golden paintings were inspired by the mosaics in Ravenne (Italy). 

Tobias G. Natter is the author of this big book. He studied art history and history at the universities of Innsbruck, Munich, and Vienna. Since October 2011 he has been the director of the Leopold Museum in Vienna. His extensive publications and his conception and organization of exhibitions on the theme of “Vienna around 1900” have made him an internationally acknowledged expert on Viennese art at the turn of the century.

Quiero ese libro YA :)

(Source: artismore)

moon83:

“The Art Toast Project Presents:” by Ida Skivenes

Idafrosk.com // Instagram: @Idafrosk

(via: Mashable)

ryanpanos:

Digital Collages of People Climbing Stairs by Jiyen Lee via MMM

Korean artist Jiyen Lee has created a series of hypnotizing digital collages that present people going up and down stairs, as seen from a bird’s eye view. Each puzzling assemblage features an unidentifiable traffic of pedestrians on an endless journey. It also remains unclear whether they are actually ascending or descending the steps in front of them, as Lee has taken the artistic liberty of reconfiguring images in unimaginable compositions. Like an M. C. Escher painting, the artist’s digitally manipulated images present a saturation of staircases with no perceivable beginning or end.