An engineer by training, Chicago-based artist Shirley Yang Crutchfield worked in tech at organizations such as Sony, Fox and Amazon before pivoting to the arts. “I’ve always wanted to be an artist, and I painted as long as I could as a child, but I stopped doing that because of pursuits in ‘accomplishments;’ I felt that I had to prove myself, and everything goes through that,” she told Observer. After five big tech experiences, Crutchfield founded her company, Muses, a platform that connects creators and entrepreneurs, enabling them to thrive together.

“I was 8 months pregnant with my first human child in addition to my tech child,” she quipped. As the need for support and infrastructure became increasingly critical, Crutchfield sold her startup to a blockchain company in Silicon Valley. “I signed the deal on my delivery bed, so I always joke that I delivered both babies at the same time.”

Crutchfield decided to leave the tech world and become a professional artist after becoming a mother of two. “There was a sense of having an identity crisis,” she admitted. After being so career-driven and thriving on accomplishments for almost two decades, the sudden shock of becoming a stay-at-home mom posed an unexpected crisis—an experience shared by many women. Crutchfield quickly found the everyday life of being in pajamas, nursing and dropping off kids to be overly consuming: “I started questioning: After all of my education and all of my hard work, is this the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?” In her search for satisfaction and a re-exploration of identity, she discovered art as a therapeutic way to regain her sense of self and began painting in the early mornings and late evenings, when she could take a break from her parenting duties.

Her paintings have a common theme and motif: powerful women in gold. They turn impressive women—from the ones in her life such as friends and other people she respects to queens and mythological figures—into artworks that acknowledge the hard work women do in their lives. “I want my collectors and viewers to see my art as mirrors of themselves, so that they could be constant reminders of their brilliance and their true identity, no matter what stage in life they’re in. Even if you’re a stay-at-home mom in your pyjamas going crazy all day, you can still remember who you are inside.”

Gold is the most prominent color and the most prominent material in Crutchfield’s works. It is a material that was historically, from the Egyptians to at least the medieval and Byzantine periods, reserved for deities, gods and people deserving of worship. “The ladies I gild in gold are who I respect and think should be the deities of our day,” Crutchfield explained.

Gilding is an incredibly labor-intensive process that requires extreme attention to detail. Mastering the techniques also involves a steep learning curve, especially for Crutchfield, who is mostly self-taught. She deliberately chose the tricky material and was determined to master it. “I wanted something with a high bar to entry to train my discipline—perhaps part of it is because of my Asian roots that value practicing discipline.” Gold also resonates with her personal taste, as she has adored the design of Versailles and paintings by Gustav Klimt since a young age.

Perhaps due to her tech training, Crutchfield’s process of learning gilding was one of reverse engineering rather than a typical pathway to craftsmanship. She first experimented with the process on her own through trial and error. “I used the gesso from stores, but I wasn’t able to make gold shiny. Then I started Googling how to make gold shiny and found the term burnish. I continued to search for how to burnish and discovered the technique of gilding.” After realizing that gilding cannot be learned through simple YouTube videos, Crutchfield reached out to a few gilding masters around the world to learn oil gilding and water gilding, mostly through Zoom. It took her at least two months to make the gold adhere. She believes that the secret to successful gilding lies in the right mix of formula—one that isn’t sold in stores. Commercial gesso has a very different recipe, and rabbit skin glue expires every two weeks, which means she has to make the materials in her studio. “I’m not allowed to tell people how to do these techniques, which is like a code of conduct. It’s great that a lot of it is still word of mouth.”

But Crutchfield did share some of the details of gold gilding with Observer. Instead of canvas, it begins with birch wood panels, over which a layer of rabbit skin glue and cheesecloth is applied to prevent cracking. After drying overnight, handmade gesso is applied with distilled water and rabbit skin glue. On top of that, she applies clay as the base for the gold, which provides a richer and more diverse color effect. While Crutchfield mostly uses 24-karat gold, some of her works are done in moon gold, rose gold and white gold, which makes viewing her art “almost like going to a jewelery shop and shopping for gold,” she said. Gold also requires very specific working conditions: if the heater or air conditioner goes on, the airflow would disrupt the gold leaves while gilding. “Every time the wind comes, I’ll joke that it’s eight dollars flying away. I use Manetti Gold from Florence, which is very expensive, and I’ll never tell my husband how much it costs,” she joked. Every painting is a time-consuming and intricate learning process that takes at least a few weeks. For her, it’s not about speed but about perfection and connection.

Crutchfield usually paints in early mornings and late nights when the kids are asleep. That’s her time to immerse herself in the details of craft. “When I get lost in the details, it’s so therapeutic. It’s not the fastest way to produce work, but it calms my nervous system and makes me realigned with myself.” Her children are sometimes also involved in her practice: they learned how to make raw materials for gold gilding with her and have tried mixing chalk with glue and distilled water.

Many of Crutchfield’s works celebrate the incredible women in her life. Crutchfield has a unique way of creating portraits for the people she loves: she starts by talking to the sitter on the phone for hours and asking a list of detailed questions, even if she has known them for years: What lights you up? What are your non-negotiables? What are some shapes that you identify with? What’s important to you? What are you trying to shed in life? From there, she creates symbols, shapes and brushstrokes inspired by these conversations to match who she thinks the sitters are inside. “I think that’s because I’m a type A tech person who needs a list of ‘product requirements’ to be answered,” she joked.

Among those portraits, one is for Dr. Kiara King, an obstetrician-gynecologist serving the South Side of Chicago. “I’ve always admired her,” Crutchfield said, “and she was the first person I told I was pregnant with my first child, before even my husband.” In the portrait, the magnolia flower in the background symbolizes abundance and serves as a tribute to Dr. King’s contributions to the communities of Chicago’s South Side. Crutchfield decided to put her in pink to highlight the soft, feminine, girly core inside her, even though she wears bold colors like red and green. When the work was revealed to Dr. King, she told Crutchfield in surprise that the pink dress showed a hidden side of her that she hadn’t revisited for a while. As an artist, Crutchfield aims for the portraits to reveal parts of the sitters that they themselves might have already forgotten, and for them to live longer than merely the present moment. Her collectors see themselves and identify with the elegant, poised, powerful women in the paintings.

Having left the tech industry, Crutchfield continues to use digital tools for artistic creation. Her creative process begins by brainstorming ideas, perhaps by researching Greek mythological figures, and seeking inspiration on websites like Pinterest. Then she uses tools like Photoshop or Pixelmator to collage the iconography into shapes for her first draft. Having played a critical role in launching the Audible iOS apps in Europe, Crutchfield continues to get inspiration from podcasts, with The Rest is History being one of her favorites. Her inspiration to paint female rulers came from an episode of The Rest is History on Queen Elizabeth I. Unlike the traditional triumvirate formed by Julius Caesar, Pompey and Crassus, Crutchfield decided to create a triumvirate for women. Her Queen’s Triumvirate features Elizabeth I, Queen Zenobia and Empress Wu Zetian, three of the most powerful women in history. Having always adored strong warrior queens, she painted a portrait of the Greek goddess Athena. Her artworks serve as testaments and documentation of women’s power and resilience, particularly when facing various societal expectations and gendered stereotypes. “All of these ladies went through the same thing, but they still rise up. They still are glamorous, while it took so much for them to become on top,” she said.

“I’ve always identified with gold. It’ll be really hard for me to imagine getting sick of it, unless I can’t afford the material anymore,” Crutchfield answered when asked if she’s going to create works in other mediums. Gold changes colors under the sun at night, and to her, nothing seems more tantalizing and precious. The precious material makes her become more serious about her practice and respect the materials more.

“I want to be known as the artist who paints iconic women,” she stated. “I want to be the artist people commission for respected women, almost like Amy Sherald’s portrait of Michelle Obama.” Regarding whether she calls her works feminist art, Crutchfield explained, “Everyone should be a feminist. In our current climate, when you say that, people put additional labels on you. I don’t want to turn away people just because of misconceptions or additional labels. I would just call my art: I celebrate women. I elevate women.” Crutchfield describes the decision of being an artist as “either passion or privilege,” and that she is privileged to take time and build connections with the ladies she paints. Nonetheless, she encourages people to try art even if they don’t want to be an artist. “You can see what mediums you pick, and if you choose abstract or realism. It’ll help you learn so much about yourself, and self-discovery is everything.”

More in Artists

• How Jorge Pardo Turns Light, Color and Form into a Phenomenology of Seeing

• The Early Experiments of Manoucher Yektai

• Hans van Manen Remembers Photographer Erwin Olaf

• Marina Abramovic’s Erotic Epic Spreads Wide (and Displays the Limits of) the Artist’s Psyche

• An Interview with Anselm Kiefer, Iconoclastic Alchemist

The city of brotherly love and sisterly affection is ready to greet art lovers with a heated exhibition season that not only raises questions but answers them, too. How do archaeologists preserve ancient Assyrian artifacts in the current conflict and destruction? Find out at the Penn Museum. How did two paintings by Paul Cézanne, in the collections of the Barnes Foundation and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, cause a huge media kerfuffle? How do contemporary artists turn fabrics and recycled everyday materials into large installation art? How did Asian American artists and activists use art to voice their resilience? We at Observer are a curious bunch, and the following art exhibitions in Philadelphia did much to slake our thirst for knowledge.

“Kelly Kozma: Watch Me Backflip”

Paradigm Gallery + Studio, through June 1, 2025

“Watch Me Backflip” is a solo exhibition featuring the work of mixed-media and fiber artist Kelly Kozma. It uses repurposed material to show the significance and interconnectedness of small interactions within the broader environment. The artist has created a massive 22-foot circumference installation of 35,000 hand-stitched circles—a cosmic work titled Iguana & Myrrh, Magma & Reef. Objects like greeting cards, packages, clothing and threads become part of large-scale, colorful patterns. Engaged in minimal-waste practice, Kozma also utilizes materials like paper scraps and loose threads for the works in the show, which displays more than twenty mixed media works as a large assemblage. Here, her stitches create threads between the people in her life and the objects she interacts with to remind audiences of the dangers of overconsumption and emotional apathy.

“Soft/Cover”

The Fabric Workshop and Museum, through August 17, 2025

“Soft/Cover” explores how artists utilize fabric and screenprinting to create objects whose significance lies in their relation to the human body. Drawing on the connection between textiles and other disciplines, such as fashion and architecture, the exhibition shows new and rarely displayed works from The Fabric Workshop and Museum’s collection—each created by artists-in-residence in collaboration with FWM’s Studio team. Inspired by some of FWM’s earliest residencies in the late 1970s and early 1980s, “Soft/Cover” celebrates artists who have created everything from everyday workwear to costumes but also expanded beyond garments to design bedding, umbrellas, furniture and large-scale installations. Eight new resident artists were commissioned for the exhibition to further expand the Workshop’s history and mission: to open pathways for these artists’ ideas, introducing new materials and forms to their evolving practices.

“Preserving Assyria”

Penn Museum, through February 2026

As one of the world’s first empires, Assyria, as an ancient civilization, is unique in that it still has a profound influence on Iraq’s cultural identity. While ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) actively attempts to erase and distort this part of history, this exhibition shows how Iraqi archaeologists, with support from Penn archaeologists and international partners, are reclaiming and protecting their cultural and artistic heritage during and after conflict. Centered on the recently excavated Mashki Gate in Nineveh, Iraq—a monumental Assyrian site destroyed in 2016—the exhibition highlights touchable 3D replicas of Assyrian reliefs on view alongside sixteen artifacts from the Penn Museum’s Near East collection. “Preserving Assyria” is on view in the Merle-Smith Galleries on the Lower Level, in harmony with the museum’s permanent Middle Eastern collection.

“The Battle of the Bathers”

Barnes Foundation, through September 15, 2025

Dr. Albert C. Barnes, whose collection forms the basis of the Barnes Foundation, purchased The Large Bathers in 1933. This masterpiece is the crown jewel of his collection of more than 50 paintings by the French painter Paul Cézanne. Four years after the purchase, however, a public feud erupted when the Philadelphia Museum of Art acquired another version of the Bathers. The quality of each work was scrutinized while the press hurled itself into the controversy. “The Battle of the Bathers,” which features archival letters, clippings and photographs, traces Dr. Barnes’ purchase of his Large Bathers to explore its clash with the PMA in the media and expose the heated tensions that gave rise to the strife.

“The Quest for Truth in the Idea of the Garden”

The Charles Addams Fine Arts Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, through June 8, 2025

Co-curated by professor and artist Ken Lum and scholar Xianghua Liu, this international touring exhibition showcases contemporary artworks rooted in the transformation of traditional garden culture. Featuring contributions from thirty renowned contemporary artists as well as faculty and students from Minzu University of China—the nation’s leading institution for minority groups—the exhibition celebrates artistic innovation and the pursuit of knowledge. The selected works explore how minority cultures creatively respond to the environmental challenges of the modern world. Despite its somewhat unwieldy title, “The Quest for Truth in the Idea of the Garden: China Garden Cultural Contemporary Art International Tour Exhibition” aptly draws from both Eastern and Western religious traditions and philosophical views of nature to showcase the deep interconnection between eternal concepts, the cosmos, the Earth and human culture.

The 124th Annual Student Exhibition

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, through June 1, 2025

Experience the creative energy of the next generation of artists in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ 124th Annual Student Exhibition—a showcase of work by graduating MFA, post-baccalaureate, certificate and BFA students. The ASE is more than just an exhibition—it represents a milestone in these artists’ journeys as they step into professional practice and contribute to Philadelphia’s vibrant cultural landscape. For collectors, art lovers and first-time buyers, it offers a unique opportunity to discover and acquire original works by some of the most promising emerging talents. Featuring hundreds of works across painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and illustration, the exhibition is entirely curated, installed and managed by the students themselves and reflects the institution’s deep commitment to equipping students with the artistic and professional skills needed to thrive. One look and it’s clear these young artists are ready to leave their mark on the art world.

“Crescendo: How Art Makes Movements (1981-1999)”

Asian Arts Initiative, through June 28, 2025

“Crescendo: How Art Makes Movements (1981-1999)” is a historical survey of multidisciplinary art projects that intersected with Asian American social movements between 1981 and 1999. Drawing inspiration from jazz and improvised music from the Black Arts Movement, the show attempts to redefine the presence of Asian Americans beyond the politics of representation. The exhibition’s title is a metaphor for the growing sociopolitical activism of the ’80s and ’90s, when Asian American artists thrived with major achievements in the creative arts through collaborative explorations, and the show has three sections focused on different collective projects: Asian Improv aRts/Records, the Afro Asian Music Ensemble and the East Side Band.

“Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s”

Philadelphia Museum of Art, through September 1, 2025

Philadelphia Museum of Art’s newest exhibition dives deep into the art and design of the World War II and post-war years, when major changes in politics, science, economics, industry and arts and culture occurred in the wake of global catastrophe. In this period of turmoil, artists brought new ideas to their work across media—from fashion and textiles, craft and design to printmaking, drawing, photography, painting and sculpture. “Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s” is a testament to the creative spirit that flourished despite the restrictions and adversity of the era and showcases art from across the decade, with works drawn entirely from the museum’s permanent collection.

“The Shape of Light: Form and Shadow in Motion”

Stanek Gallery Philadelphia, through June 28, 2025

“The Shape of Light: Form and Shadow in Motion” invites viewers to experience the dynamic interplay between form and light. Featuring works by Roger Chavez, Barbara Fisher, Leah Kaplan and Michael Quadland, the show brings together a diverse range of media to examine how light both animates and alters our perception of form. Through themes of transformation and transition, the artists explore the dramatic tension between light’s illuminating force and shadow’s defining absence.

Born in Shanghai in 1959 into a family of intellectuals, Feng Xiao-Min began studying Chinese ink painting and calligraphy at an early age. Nearly thirty years later, he moved to Paris to pursue an artistic career. He attended École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris and, there, began developing a painting style inspired by both Chinese and French artistic traditions. His abstract yet colorful paintings, adored by individual and institutional collectors alike, create a unique visual impact of tranquility and fluidity on the picture plane.

Feng’s endeavor to develop a style that bridges Chinese and French artistic languages has come a long way. “In my first exhibition, I showed twenty-eight works, but none of them sold. It was hugely frustrating,” Feng told Observer. His ink paintings, when exhibited outside their cultural context, required more mediation to be appreciated by audiences. After that disheartening experience, he spent extensive time reflecting on how his works could speak to the French art background and began pairing the techniques he’d spent years perfecting with new mediums.

According to Feng, instead of pursuing depth in color textures as in European oil paintings, Chinese painting emphasizes the smoothness of brushwork across the picture plane—something European audiences often associate with watercolors. “The pursuit of color effect is something embedded in European art, as the inspiration is everywhere: the unique nature, history or even more quotidian things like the curation of shop windows,” he said. He eventually realized that such depth of color could not be achieved using traditional ink pigments. “I found that the more vibrant and diverse color schemes in oil paintings speak better to the French audience, so I worked to create more visible color effects. My first step was to mount my paintings on Chinese rice paper onto canvases, as paper surfaces are too fragile,” Feng added.

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While experimenting with canvases, Feng considered critically the Chinese ink painting traditions he inherited. “When I was young, we all painted by modeling after painting manuals like the Manual of the Mustard Seed Garden, and thought that it was the best form of painting,” he explained. “However, what it teaches us is a highly stylized way of painting individual motifs that, in a way, limit individual creativity. A painter has to go beyond that, otherwise everyone’s work will end up looking the same.”

There are still elements of Chinese painting that remain more or less intact in Feng’s works. His composition and the proportions of his paintings follow the principles of Chinese calligraphy, especially the treatment of space that is intentionally left blank to create a sense of breadth. The rendering and penetration of colors—and the unique yet sporadic reactions that pigments, water and canvas produce when blending—are signatures Feng has inherited. Abstraction is his answer to the question of how to break away from academic painting traditions.

When viewing Feng’s works, one is reminded of a number of masters, from Chinese landscape painters like Juran to modern Western artists such as J.M.W. Turner or Cézanne. “It’s interesting because these painters happen to be the ones that I love,” Feng said with a laugh. “I always argue that Turner is actually the pioneer of Impressionism, prior to other painters like Monet. Honestly, I’m not too interested in Turner’s early academy paintings, but he had a huge surge of creativity at the end of his life, in which he broke previous concepts and traditions about painting. That is extremely rare for any artist to experience, and I think it comes from a superior realm of relaxation in painting.”

Feng believes that finding one’s own artistic voice is one of the most important things a painter can do. “I don’t think of others’ styles when I paint, as I focus solely on my canvas. However, I am aware that one can be unconsciously influenced by other painters as one surrounds oneself with these works,” he admitted. “I am very alert about that and try not to be encompassed by others’ styles.”

Thanks to his unique abstractions and his contributions to both Chinese and French contemporary art, Feng is often mentioned alongside other Chinese-French abstract painters like Zao Wou-ki or Chu Teh-chun, with whom he had personal relationships. “People often describe my paintings as bridging Chinese and French art,” Feng said. “I think my style was developed naturally rather than intentionally created. The artistic education and training that one receives live in one’s blood and soul for a lifetime. I’m lucky that these traditions were kept with me and not forgotten.”

Every one of Feng Xiao-Min’s paintings, even those of similar size, takes a different amount of time to complete, and Feng rarely feels fully satisfied with his output. “This subtle process is related to the mood, nature, temperature and sometimes I actually don’t know why,” Feng said, adding that he views presence and absence—and the ability to control the painting process—through a Taoist lens. The time it takes to practice calligraphy and painting is particularly long, and the training lies in the control of the brush. But when it takes too long, it instead becomes difficult to control. Hence, the natural and perfect reflection on the canvas is the balance of yin and yang from a perspective of philosophical relationships.

When asked to comment on the opinion that painting is dead in the contemporary art market, Feng disagrees: “Painting as a field is difficult because there are too many painters out there, and it’s hard for painters to establish themselves. People have been saying that painting is dead for decades, yet painting as a medium has been alive for thousands of years and will remain alive. Sales figures for paintings remain high today.”

This fall, Feng will present a new solo exhibition in Singapore. His shows focus almost exclusively on new paintings and rarely revisit older works. Feng says he no longer titles his works or exhibitions to allow space for imagination. “I used to spend a lot of time thinking about titles, but I realized names might restrict people’s perception of paintings.” He might, he said by way of example, title something as water, but viewers see streets or walking or dancing figures. “It all makes sense after they explain what they see to me, and I’d like to encourage this free imagination and association.”

“Feng Xiao-Min, Sailing Through the Light” is on view at Opera Gallery New York through May 17, 2025.

Attention bibliophiles and antiquarians: did you know that some old manuscripts are downright deadly? In modern society, it’s entirely safe to browse through books, but for centuries, flipping through the pages of a single tome could have devastating health consequences, as toxic chemicals were often used in their creation. The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore is digging into this lesser-known side of bibliology in “If Books Could Kill,” which looks at the dark and dangerous side of the production of illustrated manuscripts and other texts.

It’s not a large exhibition, but it’s a versatile one, covering medieval bookmaking technology and science, the social lives of books and contemporary conservation science. It also explores the life stories of the book illustrators who suffered from various maladies after extensive exposure to toxic materials.

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“When I first came to Walters, there were only four manuscripts created by women, and I was interested in women’s engagement in manuscripts,” Dr. Lynley Anne Herbert, who co-curated the exhibition, tells Observer. “When I got Clothilde Missal, a manuscript illustrated by Clothilde Coulaux, I found it surprisingly heavy.” When she asked the museum’s book conservator why it was so weighty, she was told that “the heaviness came from the beautiful creamy white colors, which are full of lead.”

Neither Dr. Herbert nor the book’s dealers had known that the book contained lead, and that discovery prompted her to consider the impact daily work with toxic materials might have had on Coulaux’s health. As it turns out, a substantial number of medieval manuscripts contain toxic materials such as white lead and red mercury, which were both common pigments used during Coulaux’s lifetime (1878-1931). The exhibition reveals how these and other toxic materials were used by scribes, artists and bookbinders and showcases twenty-four rarely displayed examples of beautiful but dangerous manuscripts from the Walters Art Museum’s extensive collection.

There’s cross-cultural representation here, as Europeans weren’t the only ones using pigments created with arsenic and other toxic materials. “If Books Could Kill” has plenty of geographical and chronological range—there’s the 19th-century Treatise on Elephants from Thailand with its arsenic-based yellows and a 15th-century copy of the Armenian Gospels with vermillion pigments made with cinnabar.

This exhibition also offers a rare behind-the-scenes look at the work of conservation scientists. While some toxicants can be identified by sight, others are only revealed through scientific testing. A conservator-led video in the exhibition demonstrates how portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) is used to identify the mercury in the heart shapes embellishing the pages of one illustrated medieval manuscript.

“I’m a huge fan of gloves, not only when handling these books but many other things, really,” conservation scientist Dr. Annette S. Ortiz Miranda, who curated the exhibition with Dr. Herbert, tells Observer. “Don’t touch any of the colored parts with clean hands. If all pages are covered completely with lead white, wear gloves.” While books with hazardous illustrations are not dangerous when closed, there are varying levels of toxicity associated with different categories of books.

The conservation science focus of “If Books Could Kill” can be traced to the Walters Art Museum’s unique history. The Walters family and the museum have long been interested in technical research. The institution’s Conservation Department, the third of its kind in the U.S., was founded in 1934, and the museum’s science lab was established in 2004. There, conservation scientists work with items from the collection to answer questions of provenance, age and authenticity, with their findings shaping the content of exhibition labels for visitors.

Dr. Herbert believes the recently opened book gallery is the museum’s “hidden gem. “It helps us realize the importance of the collection,” she says of the new exhibition space in the Medieval Gallery. The Walters’ manuscript collection is, indeed, important, with over 1,000 manuscripts from many cultures, 1,300 incunabula (printed books from before 1500) and 2,000 printed books from the 16th to the 20th Centuries.

“If Books Could Kill” offers a fresh perspective on historical bookmaking practices. It’s common to admire illustrated manuscripts’ beauty but less so to consider what went into it. The curators reassure us that it’s completely safe to view the toxic works in the show from afar and that there are ways for experts to handle these works safely. As the museum humorously notes on the placards: no curators, conservators or art handlers were harmed in the process of putting this exhibition together.

“If Books Could Kill” is on view at the Walters Art Museum through August 3, 2025.

“I sometimes say everything was performance or I don’t believe in fiction. Everything that people do can be understood as performance, either in terms of the performance of social roles and relationships or the performance of psychological and emotional roles. Those forms of social and psychological performance are going on all the time in institutions in particular ways,” artist Andrea Fraser tells Observer. When the practice she is associated with, institutional critique, first developed, it was within the framework of an avant-garde concept that pitted the artist against the institution and the tradition of anti-institutionalism, where institutions of art like museums could be conceived of as separate and separable from artists, critics and historians.

However, Fraser’s relationship with institutions shifted as her artistic practices developed. “I started to understand institutions, not only as entities that we enter into, but also as entities that we take into ourselves, internalize and embody them. Then we perform or enact them in the roles we take up in institutions and in relationships we develop within and around institutions.” For her, those institutions might be specific museums, though she also interrogates the field of art as a whole. What she does is, in her own words, “put a frame around some aspect of life in order to be able to think about and reflect on it.”

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In Museum Highlights (1989), Fraser performed the fictional character of Jane Castleton, a guide at the Philadelphia Museum of Art who describes facilities like a water fountain in the museum with overly dramatic and somewhat irrelevant terms. “Psychologically, Castleton is a container that I created as part of my relationship with institutions that I didn’t want to own or identify with publicly,” Fraser says. That relationship is complex: it includes the desire to rebel against those institutions because she feels dominated, delegitimized and marginalized by them. But there are also parts of her that identify with institutions and want to be legitimized and recognized by them, which informed what was embodied by Castleton.

Museum Highlights also explores class and race in engagement with institutions. Castleton is dressed explicitly as an upper-class lady. In the performance, Fraser as Castleton described the person who named the gift shop, Andrea. The descriptions of Andrea were actually taken from a museum publication dedicated to a museum docent who passed away, which was an honorific and idealized description. Fraser explains, “One of the parts of the description is that I’m a blonde medium-height lady, so for me, that very much has to do with race, as I’m not blonde and half Puerto Rican. The museum is, therefore, a locus of class and with a long history in the U.S. of assimilation of whitening or passing within a set of racial hierarchies.”

When making those early museum tours, Fraser was referencing the videotapes used to record and broadcast museum walkthroughs at the time—specifically, Masterpieces of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Philippe de Montebello, the longtime director of the Met. “When I recorded my performance, I was performing directly to the camera, and viewers of these videotapes are not the second-order audience.” Otherwise, the audience of the original performance becomes part of the spectacle of the performance, which creates an opportunity to not identify with the audience and to differentiate and distance oneself from the experience from a safe distance, especially if embarrassing or uncomfortable. She also has performances documented with live audiences, but she’s very careful about that.

In Little Frank and His Carp (2001), which was shot with hidden cameras at the Guggenheim because she didn’t get the museum’s permission, Fraser posed as a visitor navigating the lobby with the audio tour. A voiceover tells the visitor that one might want to touch “the sensuous curves of the building, which is pretty suggestive,” Fraser says. “I touched the building, got a little carried away, started rubbing up against it, and pulled my dress up. At that moment the camera cuts to a shot of people in the museum watching me. That’s the moment when people laugh the most when they watch the videotape.” It’s a form of humor that she tries to be very, very careful with. “I don’t want to let my audience off the hook. I want them to grapple with being embarrassed, guilty or culpable.”

Performance-based video installations are very different from live performances, in Fraser’s opinion, because the direct address to the camera is so important. In one of her most recent performance-based video installations, This Meeting is Being Recorded (2021), she is looking directly in the eyes of everyone watching the video, which is something that can’t be achieved in person. There are limits to this approach, however. “I’m a bit reluctant to give people access to view these videos because, again, you’re viewing it on a monitor, and you don’t have the experience of a video installation.” This tendency for information technology to reduce everything to just an image rather than a physical experience is the opposite of what she aims for. She typically doesn’t edit her videos much because she is “still fundamentally minimalist” in her aesthetics. “I don’t respond to gratuitous manipulation of video effects: I feel that you’re trying to manipulate me, and I don’t want to be manipulated.”

Fraser’s most recent site-specific project for a museum was Down the River (2016) at the Whitney. It was part of a series of two-week exhibitions that the Whitney conceived for the fifth floor of the museum—a space designed by starchitect Renzo Piano to showcase new art and architecture. It provides a spectacular view with a full wall of windows looking onto the Hudson River and another wall of windows facing Manhattan. Thinking about the location of the museum, Fraser went to Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison built in the 1820s about 32 miles up the Hudson River from the Whitney Museum’s new location. Fraser’s recordings come from its Cell Block A, which dates back to around the 1920s. “There is this very New York phrase ‘being sent up the river,’ meaning going to prison, and also there’s a movie called Up the River. I brought the sounds of Sing Sing Correctional Facility to the Whitney Museum and wrote a wall text explicitly linking the twin boom in museum and prison buildings,” Fraser says.

The phenomenon was documented by architect Joe Day in a book called Corrections and Collections: Architectures for Art and Crime. This polarization reflects and represents economic and racial polarization, as the majority of incarcerated people are people of color. It also creates geographical polarization because prisons tend to be built far from urban centers—out of sight and out of mind for people who are not impacted by the criminal justice system, and consequently very far from the families of incarcerated people. “I went through many different rounds with the museum on that text and there was a tremendous amount of involvement by the museum in getting that text to a point where they felt comfortable having it on the wall,” Fraser says. “For me, it’s part of the process.”

In 2012, she was invited to participate in the Whitney Biennial and proposed a text for the catalog, There’s no place like home. It is about the contradictions in the material situation of the art market and of museums’ and artists’ claims for the radical, revolutionary, critical and subversive power of their works. “When I wrote that, I was really worried that the museum wouldn’t like it and wouldn’t want to publish it,” Fraser admits. “In fact, they were very clear with me that it was an artwork and they were not going to intervene with regard to content.” The 2012 text developed on an earlier essay, L’1%, C’est Moi, written in 2011, which explored the direct link between income inequality, wealth concentration and the art market boom. It begins with details about some of the top 200 collectors at that time, including their involvement in the subprime mortgage crisis, and it was very critical of collectors, trustees and the art market.

For Fraser, the ‘90s marked the beginning of a phase of globalization, neoliberalization, privatization and corporatization during which museums that may have once been public institutions became increasingly privatized. That period also brought a massive expansion in the number of museums, contemporary art galleries and international survey exhibitions, which required curators and institutions to maintain a relentless global schedule. The sheer number of exhibition venues turned art into an industry that demanded a constant supply of product and, ultimately, increasing spectacle as museums competed for funding from corporate, individual and public sources. Responding to the values of those funders, museums became part of the attention economy. That shift dramatically changed the relationship between artists and museums, as artists increasingly felt compelled to produce massive installations that filled massive spaces. “There are very few alternatives because if you refuse to do that as an artist, then you’re not going to be in those shows and will disappear,” Fraser clarifies. When she started making art in the 1980s, she didn’t realize she was part of a just-emerging field that was growing alongside institutional critique, which started in the ‘60s.

Since 2022, Fraser has been represented by Marian Goodman Gallery—her first U.S. commercial representation since 2012. Marian Goodman Gallery was a good fit for her because “it has a long history of working with and supporting conceptual artists and moving image artists,” she explains. It is also one of the last galleries of its size and reputation that still maintains an artistic program. “At a certain point, instead of having artistic programs, galleries had market positions and became a mixture of photography, paintings, installations and conceptual arts. It then comes down to the question of why commercial galleries show video when video represents only 0.5 percent of the art market by value.” Marian Goodman is one of the last significant galleries still rooted in conceptual art, minimalism and the moving image, which provides a strong context for her work.

Fraser takes a heavily research-based approach to her explorations of social structures, which is rooted in the history of contemporary art methodologies. “I don’t produce that much,” Fraser says, laughing. “It’s partly because I don’t want to be producing products and spectacle for the market and the attention economy.” For her, research-based art practices and research as an artistic methodology are associated with a very specific history tracing back to the ‘60s—to artists like Hans Haacke, Adrian Piper, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula, who conducted rigorous research as part of their works. “The idea of artistic research is that artists are producing knowledge, which to me is a pretty high bar. It’s more than summarizing primary or secondary literature, which is what lots of artists end up doing as a way of generating content for products and spectacles, I’m afraid.”

When Fraser embarked on the project L’1%, C’est Moi, there were numerous articles about the art market booming and wealth concentration. There was obviously a connection between the two, but nobody was talking about it. Similarly, in 2016, when she started to develop 2016 in Museums, Money, and Politics, people were discussing the donor class—describing wealthy political donors who, after the deregulation of campaign finance, were having increasing influence on politics—but they weren’t linking the political donor class to the cultural donor class or philanthropy more broadly. Fraser saw opportunity. “My assumption is, from a psychoanalytical perspective, if there’s something that nobody’s writing about, it’s because it’s repressed in some way.” Part of her practice has been to pinpoint things people don’t want to talk about and figure out how to talk about them without alienating anyone, which is not always easy.

This Meeting is Being Recorded is a project about white racism and the role of women in white supremacy. With this piece, she hopes to contribute an approach to thinking about race and racism from a psychoanalytic perspective, because she believes most of the anti-racist methodologies that are out there are either political education or cognitive behavioral social psychology. Social psychology, which focuses on bias, is often very depoliticized. Both models presuppose a kind of conscious control, which, to her, is actually part of white supremacy and self-mastery. “I think ultimately that a lot of racism is a defense against anxiety. The piece was about developing a methodology for getting at the unconscious and emotional dimensions of white supremacy and racism.”

In addition to being a practicing artist, Fraser teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But I don’t really teach institutional critique,” she clarifies. “I did in the past, and the undergraduate students said afterward, ‘I was so depressed after your class that I decided not to be an artist anymore.’ It was not fair.” Fraser’s approach to teaching now is to create a context and a framework for students to figure out what they care about and how to make art about what matters to them. “I was hired in an area called New Genres, and now I’m in an area called Interdisciplinary Studio, and my approach to teaching is not about medium. The primary question that I ask students always is, what do you want the work to do, not what you want it to be about. Do you want the work to activate a thought process, an intellectual process, an associative process, a process of imagining? Do you want it to activate a physical experience or an emotional and psychological experience? Do you want it to activate mechanisms or shifts in social and economic structures?” Fraser has students write not an artist statement but what she calls a purpose statement that they read aloud in class. “If you’re afraid to share what you care about, then it is going to be hard to make art about it. I try to create a space that holds vulnerability for students, and I think it can be very powerful for students to realize they survive the anxieties of that exposure and vulnerability. It gives them courage to put more of themselves in their work.”

Fraser makes a diagram of contemporary art to help them determine where they want to be located in its three primary subfields: exhibitions (artists producing experiences), the art market (artists producing value) or academia (artists producing knowledge). There are also other subfields, like community-based art producing communities and activism, where artists are (ideally) producing social change. “When you’re an artist, you’re always making one decision after another: how do I determine the idea, size and medium of my work? The values underlying the criterion for these decisions are very political, as people keep producing bigger art products that become more of a spectacle,” Fraser says. By way of example, she points to Venice Biennale exhibitions that have a mix of old and new art, where everything made after 2020 is twice or three times the size of older works for the purpose of grabbing attention.

“The problem that I find in a lot of work by younger artists and, frankly, by all artists, is that they’re trying to do too many things at once. Part of that is a lack of clarity about what they want the work to do, and part of it is trying to satisfy different expectations.” She says that if an artist wants to say something, they should start with the most direct way to say it, and every step an artist takes needs to have a good reason.

Fraser’s works continue to inspire people to reevaluate their relationship with art institutions and social institutions in general. From sarcastic museum highlight tours to rigorous research-based articles about the economy and wealth concentration in the art world, her output is well-reasoned and continues to challenge assumptions about institutional power, supremacy, privilege and individuals’ struggles with systems and labels. In an increasingly spectacle-oriented art market, her nuanced work holds its own.

Laurent Martin “Lo” is a visionary French artist renowned for his masterful bamboo sculptures that appear to float or balance with ethereal elegance. Trained as a visual artist in Paris, Lo spent many years working as a creative director both in advertising and fashion before embarking on an art career. His passion for bamboo led him to travel across Asia to study traditional techniques for working with his favorite material. These experiences shaped his distinctive artistic language, enabling him to turn bamboo into installations that explore the balance of light, form and materiality.

“When I first encountered bamboo in 1998, I fell in love with it. Its nobility, balance, lightness, sensuality and energy seduced me immediately,” Lo tells Observer. “I then spent five years studying it, experimenting with its extraordinary virtues, before, in 2004, abandoning my life at the time (in the world of advertising and fashion) to follow ‘Ma route du Bambou (my bamboo route)’ across Asia.” The route passed through India, Thailand, Vietnam and Laos in search of the origins of bamboo.

“Bamboo gave me the opportunity to rediscover a sense of balance and meaning in my life in response to my artistic concerns. Since then, my relationship with him has grown stronger and stronger through an ongoing dialogue,” Lo explains. He allows himself to be guided by it, drawn to its reliability and limitless creative potential.

In addition to its material and spiritual virtues, bamboo is one of the most environmentally friendly plants, thanks to its ultra-fast growth and the way it absorbs carbon dioxide and emits oxygen at a much faster pace than most trees. In Lo’s initial research over the first five years, he had to experiment alone and empirically with its qualities, given that the Western world at the time had little cultural connection or interest in bamboo. Over the next 20 years, with successive travels around the world to meet craftsmen, technicians, architects and great masters of bamboo, he completed his apprenticeship and solidified his own expertise as the material gained wider recognition.

Bamboo embodies seven great virtues—balance, lightness, flexibility, strength, energy, sensuality and spirituality—qualities that also define humanity. “It is the source of Asian wisdom. More than a material, it’s also a life companion,” Lo says. “In addition to the ancestral techniques I’ve learned and the recent technologies I’ve applied, the emotional and spiritual charge of bamboo completes the dialogue I maintain with it daily in my workshop.”

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“I’m always very attentive to the characteristics of the spaces in which my works are installed. They themselves define their own spaces, which include emptiness and fullness, light and shadow, movement and stillness.” This interplay of complementary elements is their equilibrium. To Lo, it’s clear that the spaces where his sculptures are installed play a decisive role. What’s more, the shadows cast on the walls add a fourth dimension—a “calligraphic” reading of his bamboo sculptures.

In his 2024 solo exhibition at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery in Hong Kong, titled “Celestial Equilibrium,” shadows of his works are projected to the white walls of the gallery in different shapes and occasionally intertwine with each other. This new layer of calligraphic shadowing enhances the interplay of tension and movement in the large white cube gallery.

By virtue of his training and his artistic concerns, he considers himself generally an heir to his mentors and masters rather than strongly influenced by a certain individual or style. “I took my first steps without any cultural reference to bamboo. So I developed my own ‘style’ or rather ‘modus operandi.’ This is undoubtedly why my work seems to interest Asian audiences, as they perceive a fusion between Western culture and a material rooted in their own culture, without imitating or copying it,” Lo says. The overall aesthetic of his work stems from his use of a material whose characteristics generate forms that are naturally found in Asian art and architecture.

Since 2013, Lo has been developing a collection of habitable sculptures that define architectural spaces. These pieces, which he calls “Energy Domes,” are, according to him, destined to “clean” the space around us and convert it into an empty zone wherein to meditate and relax. Lo’s titles hint at his artistic intent, but for these rather abstract sculptures, he leaves interpretation up to the viewers. “My work involves the senses, not the intellect. It’s a bit like music, where I don’t have to explain anything.”

Lo’s deep grasp of bamboo’s natural properties, coupled with his exploration of tension, balance and movement, results in works that are both visually striking and spatially profound. Each sculpture in “Celestial Equilibrium” invited viewers on a sensory journey, drawing them into the delicate interplay of material, light and air.

Indian master intaglio painter Krishna Reddy played a critical role in developing viscosity printing, which allows an artist to print a multi-colored image from a single printing plate. “Krishna Reddy: Heaven in a Wildflower,” now on at Print Center New York, is the first monographic exhibition to focus on the artist in decades and a rare opportunity to see Reddy’s work. (The last major exhibition of Reddy dates back to his solo exhibition at the Bronx Museum in 1981.) Coinciding with Reddy’s centennial, “Heaven in a Wildflower” brings together more than fifty prints, sculptures, ephemera and working materials on loan from the artist’s estate that showcase Reddy’s material and conceptual approach to printmaking.

For curator Sarah Burney, the opportunity to work on the exhibition was a full-circle moment. “Looking back, it seems like everything was leading up to this show,” Burney told Observer. After studying printmaking at Wellesley College, she went to work in a contemporary South Asian art gallery and then became studio manager for contemporary South Asian artist Zarina Hashmi and manager for programs and exhibitions at the Robert Blackburn printmaking workshop. Blackburn was a close friend of Reddy’s, and Hashmi was Reddy’s student and friend, as well as a godparent to Reddy’s daughter, Apu. “I met Krishna numerous times at Hashmi’s studio, but he was always sort of this very revered teacher figure, so it was my biggest regret that I didn’t sit down and talk to him about his art.” Burney says.

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“Heaven in a Wildflower” is her chance to reconnect with Reddy, but she’s not the only one in the printmaking world whose career trajectory was deeply influenced by him. The legacy of his pedagogy was evident at the exhibition opening, where more than 400 people in the printmaking community braved a freezing winter night to attend. “So many people, including one of the Guerrilla Girls, told me that Reddy was their printmaking professor,” Burney said, “and that was a beautiful testament to his community building work and dedication.”

Reddy’s extensive writings about both art and his teaching guided her approach to curation. “Reading his philosophy unlocks his technical innovation, his artistry and his pedagogy,” she explained, adding that she went through every box of the Krishna Reddy Papers at the Special Collections at New York University, where Reddy taught printmaking. But in addition to the intangible, “Heaven in a Wildflower” explores Reddy’s studio practices—something Burney gained insight into after speaking extensively to Judy Reddy, Krishna’s widow, and spending time in his studio.

In fact, one of the most interesting parts of the exhibition is the display of the artist’s retrofitted tools and working materials, which came from dental toolkits. Traditionally, people draw on a plate, but Reddy saw the sculptural possibilities within the plate. He was not as interested in the technical specifications of printmaking per se, but rather was fascinated by the various visual painterly effects he could create.

“Heaven in a Wildflower” also emphasizes the Indian roots of Reddy’s artistic voice and challenges the common Eurocentric reading of Reddy’s works as learning and borrowing from the artistic grounds of Paris and New York. “Whenever people spoke about Krishna, they would start the clock from Atelier 17 when he came to Europe, as if Europe made him,” Burney said. “As I was doing my research, I realized that Reddy left India as a fully mature artist.” He studied in Santiniketan, the school Rabindranath Tagore founded, with Nandalal Bose, was part of the Quit India movement, and lived through partition and the Bengal famine. Burney included his Bengal Famine drawings in the exhibition specifically as a correction to misconceptions about Reddy’s artistic development. “We need to talk about those early years before Europe. To me, the way he considers a subject, the deep philosophical approach he had to art and life and teaching was all grounded in the early years in India, which is why I really wanted to put that vitrine of early work into the exhibition.”

As for the title of the show, Krishna’s way of looking at art was to find ‘heaven in a wildflower.’ He paid very close attention to details—both expected and not; accidents such as the ink and oil not mixing became a beautiful moment of discovering viscosity. As an artist who saw education as his primary mission and was unconcerned about the fluctuations and predilections of the art market, Reddy created numerous uneditioned works, printing as many as he needed to explore the imaginative yet socially sensitive images of the life that surrounded him.

“Krishna Reddy: Heaven in a Wildflower” is at Print Center New York through May 21, 2025.

“My conceptual art position started from the moment I conceptualized my body as a needle,” Kimsooja tells Observer. This idea can be traced back to her walking performance video Sewing into Walking (1994). At the time, she didn’t describe herself as a conceptual artist—nor did she anticipate how far and deep the practice would carry her. “I didn’t make any distinctive description, but that happened when I was just doing a daily practice of installing bed cover fabrics in the valley, and then at the end, I collected them on my shoulder and arms. That was a traditional kind of a transformative form of fabric that was three-dimensional and fluid, which gives a different status of a painting surface. While I was walking around the valley, I discovered my body as a symbolic needle that weaves the fabric of nature.”

When Kimsooja reviewed the video documentation, she also realized that, for her, the video screen itself—or even the camera lens—could function as a kind of wrapping method rather than merely capturing images. That was the first time she conceptualized video-making as a process of taking and unwrapping immateriality into the video screen. Meanwhile, her notion of the body as a symbolic needle came from objectively observing herself moving through nature. That was the first conceptualization happening in her practice. Since that initial realization, she has continued to view bodily movement through that framework of the needle, particularly in her A Needle Woman performance video series, produced between 1999 and 2009 in various formats: one as an eight-channel real-time video documentation and another in slow motion for the 2005 Venice Biennale, in which she focused on cities marked by conflict and instability in the wake of the Iran-Iraq war.

The first video focused on metropolises and space. Back then, Kimsooja was more interested in engaging with humanity around the world and exploring her body as an axis of space that differentiates and demonstrates the differences across regions. A subsequent 2005 work was very different: it explored notions of time, using her body as a zero point in slow motion that contextualized the audience’s bodies, reactions and movements.

Kimsooja’s concept has also evolved—from the needle to the mirror and the breath. Today, she relates the needle to space and eternity. “A needle point has a location but no physical occupation; it was very interesting for me to open up a new space when I think of the needle’s point,” she says. When she performed A Laundry Woman (2001/2007) in the Yamuna River, India, she suddenly felt confused. “I was so focused, almost like the point of a needle. I was thinking about whether the river was flowing past my body or it was my body that was moving across the river.”

The mirror, on the other hand, is a reflector that shows everything in front of it but not itself, which raised more questions that inspired Kimsooja to experiment with different performances and film projects, employing her gaze as another way of manifesting the needle in the world. In this way, she explores relationships and juxtaposition in the cultural world and the performative element of textile making, as well as local communities, garments, decorations and architectural forms.

“My early practice as a painter was always about the passion on the surface of the canvas,” Kimsooja says. “The canvas itself might not be the point of conceptualization, but it was kind of the source of conceptualization. The fundamental question for me as a painter involved interrogating the boundaries and barriers between the self and other relationships. Painters always experience confrontation in front of the canvas. I connected sewing to painting by piercing into that canvas barrier to see how the surface connects the self with the other.”

Canvas, after all, is fabric, and Kimsooja has been experimenting with and pondering its vertical and horizontal structure since she became an artist. “I see all the inner structure of the world, our language, our lifestyle, our psychological state and even architecture and furniture—all of this has this kind of cross-shaped basic structure.”

Kimsooja’s conceptualization practice also includes the making of site-specific work, which began with her interest in responding relationally to space. She is particularly drawn to site specificity outside white cube gallery spaces in which artists are often constrained because she’s interested in hearing the voice, color, shape and functionality of a space as it exists. She aims to provide the most accurate and poignant response to each site, considering the conditions that might bring about the most fitting answers from her perspective within her ongoing thread of practice. “Curator questions have been very interesting for me to answer to the maximum from my knowledge and sensibility, so that each site-specific installation has been very meaningful and rewarding for me as a means to create a new path in my career and new path of experience and expression.”

Recently, Kimsooja completed a site-specific stained glass installation at the Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Metz in France, commissioned for the cathedral’s 800th anniversary. For her, it was a learning process—working with historical monuments and French stained glass specialists to realize her stainless steel and glass work To Breathe as a permanent installation. It was also her first time experimenting with Nano Polymer stained glass. Collaborating with the French master glassmaker Pierre-Alain Parot during the pandemic years, Kimsooja was able to juxtapose traditional handmade glass with industrial dichroic glass layered on top, producing an unexpected light effect that changes with the light source, its direction, the time of day and the intensity of light. “That kind of project that will stay forever is very meaningful.”

Another site-specific work Kimsooja created during the pandemic was Sowing into Painting (2020) at Wanås Konst in Sweden, where she planted nearly an acre of flax seeds. One side of the flax plant can be used to make linen canvas, while the other can be used to extract linseed oil for paint. For her, planting became an act of painting the land. The harvesting, making linen fiber, weaving with the local community and installing linen formed a cyclical project that marked a return to canvas after questioning the material—along with everything that comes with that questioning: experimenting and examining different ways of understanding it. It was a particularly meaningful project completed, as it was, during a personally difficult period, but seeing her field in full bloom brought her pleasure and hope.

Her most recent site-specific work was installed in AlUla, Saudi Arabia, a spectacular desert location that once lay below sea level with striking geological formations of rocks, mountains and sand fields. “Everything was in silence and in full light, and it was so special,” Kimsooja recalls. She created a circular maze of glass windows coated with a diffraction grating film, which breaks the intense sunlight into rainbow spectrums. It, too, became a kind of canvas for her, as the diffraction—woven from vertical and horizontal structures of near-nano-scale light lines—formed an immaterial, invisible fabric.

While Kimsooja’s practice has shifted from material to immaterial and from making to unmaking, she finds herself thinking about preservation more than she once did. Earlier in her career, when she was working with bed covers and fabrics, she often recycled and reused installation materials . Now, in her large-scale, immaterial site-specific installations, she uses light and sound, void and reflection as core materials—balancing the ephemeral and the tangible in an evolving practice.

A quote from John Cage has had a lasting impact on Kimsooja’s artistic practice. It came from an undocumented installation by Cage at the final Paris Biennale in 1985. While Kimsooja had expected to see a music-related work, there was no sound and nothing in the space. “I discovered one panel, a white panel written in black all around the corner of the bottom side of the container, that read ‘the sound is heard.’ I was completely shocked and really affected by that phrase, and I immediately recognized him as a master, and since then, that phrase kept coming to my mind whenever I was questioning makings and non-makings.”

Kimsooja’s current projects harken back to her identity as a painter and explore the full potential of the color black. She has begun a series called Meta-painting, in which she sprays a water-based black pigment—one that absorbs 99 percent of light—onto linen canvases to create layered black surfaces. “It looks like a portrait, a person, but also like a tombstone in a way,” she says. She has also been painting on glass to examine the porosity of light when seen from the side, even to the naked eye. “It’s fascinating because it looks from the front like a textile, almost like velvet. But then, when you look back, it looks like a constellation in the sky.”

She first began exploring the color black when she created a completely dark room for the Korean Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013—a work that recalled the devastating impact of Hurricane Sandy on her community. It investigates ignorance as the source of people’s fear after disasters. The black painting project she is working on now is also a continuation of her Deductive Object series of sculpture-paintings and her Brahmanda (Indian cosmic egg) inspired works in Obangsaek, the traditional Korean spectrum of five colors. Even as her practice evolves, her work continues to explore immateriality, light and site-specificity through various media. To Kimsooja, site-specificity is never confined by a material or even the site itself.

Katie Hudnall’s interest in woodmaking stems from her childhood hobby of putting things together and taking them apart. “I was not a very good student when I was a kid, but I was good at drawing and puzzles,” Hudnall tells Observer. “When it came time for me to pick a career path, my dad very sweetly said, ‘You’re not very good at the rest of school—do you want to go to art school?’ and he helped me find an art school.” She attended Corcoran College of Art and Design, initially intending to focus on drawing, painting and illustration. Once there, she started drawing little illustrations of rooms full of creepy furniture in a style similar to Edward Gorey, and it wasn’t long before she realized that instead of just drawing them, she could make them. That’s how she moved into sculpture.

In her sculpture classes, Hudnall learned to create art with different materials, but she didn’t know how to manipulate wood until she took a job working for a sculptor who was also a woodworker. The sculptor and her husband, a furniture restoration artist, showed Hudnall how to build long-lasting wooden structures and recommended her for graduate studies. Hudnall went on to earn her master of fine arts from Virginia Commonwealth University, developing her style as she learned to work with the material.

Many of her stylistic choices were pulled not from furniture but from industrial architecture and other built infrastructure. “A master of fine arts is not about making perfect objects. It’s about finding your visual voice: what is your style? What does your work look like? What do you want to say with it?” Hudnall explains. “The development of my style was much more complicated than a linear line from A to B; it was a process of trial and error.”

Wood interests Hudnall because of its ubiquitousness. “Everyone has a relationship with wooden objects. We all use things that are like our body, sized spoons, pencils, desks, chairs up to the buildings, and we all have this kind of relationship to it,” she says. That the material also has its own life written onto it, with the passing of years etched on every board in the pattern of rings, is something she finds particularly beautiful and inspiring.

Hudnall often uses recycled wooden objects in the making of her artwork. “People throw wood away all the time. I spend a lot of time climbing into dumpsters or stopping on the sidewalks and picking up old furniture and taking it back to my studio space to reassemble or reuse them.” She also looks for construction or house renovation sites and picks up discarded wood furniture. The University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches, has a tradition called Hippy Christmas in May when graduating students leave their furniture on the sidewalks for others to take. “There’s a lot of beautiful old material that gets thrown out every day because the pieces are too small or too big to be usable again, and I don’t mind taking the time or the labor.” 

Hudnall sees wood as corresponding to the lifespan of human beings. Metal hardly shows traces of human use, and fabrics deteriorate too quickly, whereas wood carries the marks of a lifetime because of its unique density. “I can hold a wooden object like I’ve held a million times before, and I’ve worn it down to match my hand. But it’s not worn out. It’s just worn to suit me. So I like how it carries all the dents and the marks of where it’s been before.” 

It takes a long time working in studios to produce the art that she makes. The title of Hudnall’s upcoming solo exhibition at the Museum for Art in Wood in Philadelphia, “The Longest Distance between Two Points,” is an allusion to the slowness of woodworking. “I think we have a tendency to equate speed and efficiency with good,” she says. “I wanted something to speak to the slowness and make space for that intentional slowness to be a good thing.” The longest distance also refers to her daily walking practices—she has been walking four to five miles a day for around seven years, and on those meandering walks, she collects things and reconnects with her body.

“My nickname is Snail because I’m really slow in my family. They’ve always called me Zippy the Wonder Snail very sweetly. The snail has become my champion for slowness, and I’ve been thinking about the spiral of the shell of a snail a lot. That made me realize that there’s no such thing as too slow. It’s just too slow in the wrong context.”

The longest distance between two points is a spiral, which also inspired the exhibition, which celebrates long, slow and non-directional paths. One of her favorite pieces in the show is a very tall, slender piece that holds a maple seed about ten feet off the ground. When one pushes a tiny lever, the artwork drops the maple seed, which then spins all the way to the ground. Hudnall is fascinated by the mechanics of everything, from how doors open on their hinges to the way a latch works with a spring inside. She usually starts a piece by sketching illustrations and mechanisms in her sketchbook and then creates the actual structure to see its three-dimensional visual effect. Her work turns an idea of a simple movement into a complicated wooden structure through the process of building and rebuilding.

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“I drew a monster holding that maple seed on my sketch board. I first made a structure that was too big, and it crushed the seed, so I kept making it more and more slender. Then, I thought I needed a structure to go up in the air, but the piece turned out to be too straight and didn’t have the movement that I wanted. So I cut it in half, moved a piece, and screwed it back on.” The finished work has a heavy bottom for structural support and a visual sense of grounding but resembles a big animal holding a maple in the air. 

Hudnall enjoys creating interactive pieces that let people touch and move fragile things. Just like society says everything should be fast, culturally, we make things that are overbuilt and strong. “People don’t get to work with fragile stuff very much. So I wanted to build a small, beautiful detail that allows people to have this gentle moment, as it takes almost no push of this lever to release this little seed.”

Because wood is such a familiar part of people’s lives, they’re not scared to approach her works and are always interested in feeling the warmth and beauty of the material. They want to open drawers or press a button. “I enjoy wonderful conversations with very young kids who are always fascinated by the pieces,” she says. “They always ask the greatest questions like ‘Is this furniture? What does it do? Why did you make them?’” Her works also tend to appeal to people with engineering backgrounds, who are quick to comment on how her mechanisms work.

Of course, as much as Hudnall loves to provide space for people to touch the work, it’s not always feasible. When it’s not, she either creates demonstration videos so people can see the movement or trains gallery docents to operate the pieces. She has had artwork come back from shows broken, but it doesn’t faze her. Once repaired, that experience becomes part of the piece. “I think it’s more beautiful if it gets repaired and goes back out and does the thing again.”

It’s obvious that Hudnall’s works are deeply connected to wonder and joy. “I’m easily delighted by the things that happen around me, like light coming through a window and hitting a staircase. A lot of people sort of walk by so many moments like that and don’t get delight from it,” she says. “Things right now are collectively very hard, and I hope my work can remind people to exercise their joy muscles and wonder muscles to capture the beauty of life.” The piece that drops the seed, for example, was inspired by the fact that so many people stop paying attention to small, wonderful things—it gets people to notice that joyful three seconds in such a way that they cannot ignore it. In other words, Hudnall made a huge, weird, 11-foot-tall creature to force us to pay attention to a three-second moment of beauty.

When Hudnall went to art school, she got the impression that artists have to be serious and high minded, and art will be best received if it is academic or very sad with themes of trauma or loss. “It took me a long time to realize that one of the things that I had to offer was, in fact, my absolute love of being alive,” she says. “I love my life, I love moving through my life, and I know that that’s privilege, luck and a lot of other things, too, but it’s also nice to remind people that things are impossible, hard, weird and terrible, but also beautiful.”

After teaching in universities full-time for fifteen years, Hudnall finds that an important overlap between her practice and her teaching is the accessibility of her artwork. People never refuse to participate in her art because it is too academic, and her works can engage people on different levels—the mechanisms, wood’s materiality or the forms and shapes. Similarly, the playful aspects of woodworking let young art students explore a path without having to figure everything out. There is always so much technically to learn about woodworking, from carving to doing joinery, which takes students in many different directions, and even if they don’t focus on woodwork later in their careers, Hudnall believes they will use those skills in their lives in some way.

Over the years, Hudnall has seen the woodworking community grow more diverse. When she started college, it was almost exclusively male, but now she teaches a mix of female, male and queer students, and her colleagues are similarly diverse. Though woodworking is often seen as a solitary, introverted craft, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s woodworking community is an important part of the art department, providing frames, pedestals and assembly help—all of which her students take pride in. Despite social media’s negative reputation, she sees it as a valuable tool woodworkers can use to connect. Thanks in part to it, “I realized that I was not the only woman in wood making, and I can see so many other people making their crafts.”

Asked whether she considers her work craft, design or sculpture, Hudnall says she doesn’t actively categorize it, as she sees little distinction between these labels. While such definitions might matter in school, she no longer feels compelled to choose. “I’m most comfortable in the craft community because I’m thinking very much about human scale when I’m making work. I think about the hand, movement and somebody interacting directly with this piece, just like they would on a piece of furniture,” she clarifies. “I think of myself as being a contemporary craft artist, as I don’t use traditional furniture techniques like dovetails in my work, but my pieces are all about working with my hands. I love all of those labels, and I will accept them all happily.”

“I don’t like being a prisoner to the art market,” artist Ken Lum tells Observer. One of the most celebrated contemporary artists hailing from Canada, Lum has enjoyed a multifaceted career—he’s an artist who works in paint and sculpture, a writer, a curator, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the founding editors of the Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. His works, which have been exhibited around the world in museums and biennials, often critique the socio-political structures of class and racial identities in contemporary societies.

Lum takes a unique stance as a teacher and mentor for young artists. He does not see teaching as an extension of his artistic practice. Instead, he simply enjoys being in the classroom because it allows him to reacquaint himself with the purpose of art, forcing him to reread and rethink things in an environment where the dialogue of art and culture can be fraught.

He has, he says, a longstanding skepticism about the art world. “I entered art thinking it was a much more lofty idealistic pursuit, but there are many aspects of the art world that I am not comfortable with. I don’t like being a prisoner of the art market. We always look at art as for the common good when the reality of the art world is in many ways parallel to many other worlds. It’s also a social field where you have to learn how you negotiate yourself.”

Lum’s writings, which cover a striking range of topics from Pazyryk carpet styles to Asian American histories, express deeper concerns. In Art and Ethnology: A Relationship in Ironies (2005), Lum wrote that the “game of art today is rather like the case of Don Quixote,” reflecting on the institutionalization of contemporary art and the museum as both cultural infrastructure and a social space. In the 1970s, when he started making art, the art world was opened up to different constituencies, such as conceptual art, that challenged the status quo of art and institutions. Among them, the most eminent criticism of art was in terms of the most prominent material form: paintings. In contrast, Lum notes a return of paintings in the art market: “Nowadays more than 90 percent of the contemporary artworks displayed in galleries are paintings,” he says, which shows a returning taste of painting among collectors that diverged from the turn to conceptualism in the ’70s.

The pursuit of art beyond the institutional framework is prominent in Lum’s works, both in galleries and in public. When asked about the key message he expresses to young artists who are navigating their careers in the institutional landscape, he says, “We all know that institutional frames define part of art. I try to transmit this self-awareness to my students for them to be fully cognizant of art and its relationship to politics, the socio-economic forces and cultural biases. There will be degrees of compromise in one’s ideals of art through negotiations, but one should be aware of one’s subject position to the world of a constellation of institutions surrounding you.”

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Lum believes a good artist needs to be proficient at negotiating with institutions, but at the same time, art should be a destabilizing force in many areas, including the institutional frame. According to German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of “the acculturation problem,” the critique of institutions eventually becomes institutionalized. However, Lum believes that the avant-garde spirit of art cannot be totally defined by institutions. “The power of art to disrupt politics through its undefinable language is still present in international biennales, especially in the less developed parts of the world, where important questions like identities and immigration are still being discussed.”

Today, Lum teaches a course called The Chinese Body and Spatial Production in Chinatown. Over the past decades, multiple plans were proposed to turn Philadelphia’s Chinatown into a casino, a stadium and, most recently, a new arena for the Philadelphia 76ers. Though the plan was approved by votes in the Philadelphia City Council, the 76ers abandoned the plan after multiple protests by the coalition of Chinatown residents and beyond. Long before teaching this class and recent activism, Lum had written two screenplays about Chinese American history. Set in 1868, the first script involves a wagon train carrying two wagons of Chinese workers contracted to work in the Idaho gold fields during the gold rush. The second script is set in 1885, three years after the Chinese Exclusion Act at the height of anti-Chinese sentiment.

His interest in Chinatown ties into the fact that the history of Chinese immigration has been imagined and represented by the West in ambiguous or even fraudulent ways over time. Topics like contracted labor are hugely underrepresented at the theoretical, practical or even pedagogical levels. Lum gives countless examples of the forgotten history of Chinese immigrants: They were among the groups that were part of the indentured labor that built much of the infrastructure of the world in the 19th Century, known as ‘The Chinese experiment.’ Not only did many Chinese die, but there were also countless massacres, like the Los Angeles Chinese massacre of 1871. Lum’s other examples include the American clipper ship Waverly, on which in 1855, 300 Chinese workers being shipped to Lima, Peru, were locked in the hold for the whole trip, and all died of asphyxiation. “I always wondered why this is not talked about,” Lum says.

Lum’s passion for teaching the history of the Chinese in America is driven from how this community has suffered from misrepresentation, stereotypes, and erasure of history for centuries, and these fraudulent rhetorics and representations are still inflicting suffering and pain for Chinese in America today. “On one hand, the Chinese are seen as hardworking, skilled, smart and highly educated workers. On the other hand, all those attributes are also seen as the wiliness of the enemy, as seen in depictions of Chinese fictitious figures, such as Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu. These stereotypes of Chinese immigrants are still present today, as China becomes demonized again.” These misrepresentations of Chinese are still pertinent in the sense that the Chinese in America are seen as the quiet and successful immigrants who are effectively squeezed out of the political discourse and public structure. The course aims to challenge the limited representation of Chinese community in contemporary American societies and fill the void of history of the Chinese in education so that it’s no longer something that “no one talks about.”

Lum’s interest in speaking for the Chinese communities sees him tracing the history of Chinatown in America. Late 19th-century Chinatown, in particular, was an intriguing place, for better or for worse, because it was a safe free space for immigrants, LGBTQ+ people and so forth, but it was also where ruthless pimps forced women as young as 12 into sex work. Historically, Americans marveled at the skills of Chinese workers creating marvelous works at trading ports, but at the same time belittling their physiques and mental ability. In contemporary America, Chinese people are still underrepresented, both politically and in arts and culture, Lum asserts. There is still the trope of effeminate Chinese masculinity. Misrepresentations continue to affect how people perceive the community—something Lum’s works (and his teachings) aim to counter.

That said, Lum’s works reach far beyond the conceptualization of art institutions and explorations of Asian identities. One of his most influential public art pieces is Melly Shum Hates Her Job (1989), exhibited on the side façade of the Witte de With Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, since 1990, when he held a solo exhibition for the commencement of the museum. In half of the billboard-style work, a friendly, smiling Asian woman sits at a desk in her office, while the large caption “Melly Shum hates her job” occupies the other half. It leaves an open-ended question of whether Melly Shum faces discrimination in the workplace due to her gender, race or some other unfortunate reason. The strong message received unprecedented attention and became such a cultural icon in Rotterdam that when the exhibition ended, the gallery directors received numerous letters and calls asking why the piece was gone. The piece was then reinstalled, and the center was renamed Kunstinstituut Melly.

Viewers’ experiences are always a crucial but somewhat unpredictable part of public art-making, and Lum mentions that he did not expect the Melly Shum poster to become so popular in the city and around the world. Still, as he works, Lum keeps viewer reception in mind. “I think every artist tries to have an ideal reception in mind, and I do, too,” and the ideal reception is based on a calculus built upon how his work has been received in the past and what he knows about his audience. “You don’t just say, ‘I hope the reception will be excellent’—it’s based on much research and thought you put into the work.” With Melly Shum Hates Her Job, he hoped people would like it, but its widespread popularity came as a surprise, “and it had nothing to do with me,” he said humbly. “Actually, I was lucky as a public artist. I was lucky that whatever confluences came into play at that moment in time. I was lucky that it resonated with people. It said something about the changing dynamics of people’s lack of freedom to explore who they are because they’re tied to their work. I was lucky I was able to tap into that.”

In Moveables (2023), a group exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia (ICA), Lum exhibited pieces from his furniture sculpture series, including The Curse is Come Upon Me. (2023). He has continued the series from 1978 to the present, exploring the potential of seemingly mundane industrially produced furniture. Why has this work held his attention for more than four decades? “The obvious answer would be that I continue to do it because I feel that I haven’t fully explored,” he says. “The language and concerns that are communicated by the work are still relevant.” On the one hand, “they look weird.” On the other, “they also are highly deflective in the sense that when people look at the furniture work, they are looking at a double image of other spaces in which the furniture could end up in or come from.” While one can appreciate the form, artistry and techniques of, say, a stainless steel sculpture, furniture evokes the invisible bodies using them in all spatial contexts.

Furniture, be it in a Fifth Avenue luxury apartment or Walmart, is characterized by economic class and different tastes that fluctuate with context. One might find a piece of Walmart furniture in a Fifth Avenue apartment if it is collected as a piece of art. “When something is displayed in a gallery, no one questions its status as art.” Lum pauses here to share an anecdote: in one of his talks in San Francisco, an audience member asked him why he picked a specific piece of striped furniture, which the questioner described as gaudy. Lum’s answer was that it was something his mother, who worked in a sweatshop as an immigrant in Canada, would have liked. Oddly, the audience was not convinced that it was a genuine answer.

Most recently, Lum has been working on a number of public art projects for his hometown in Vancouver, Canada. Previously, in Vancouver’s East 6th Avenue, Lum turned the East Van Cross—the symbol of the city’s traditionally less privileged and harder-edged half—into a 57-foot sculpture, Monument to East Vancouver (2010), that lights up after dark. One of the tropes of public art is to recall something of the past. However, when connecting sculptures to Vancouver’s history of former agrarian farmland, Lum’s project instead reinterprets public art rhetoric by creating a sculpture of an Asian picker holding a huge container of berries, which serves as an homage to the exploited labor of immigrants. Here, too, Lum shines a light on the history of immigration with artistic and social criticism shared in his thoughtful and innovative voice.