Check out our Instagram for a Q&A with cast and crew from Netflix and Sony’s “WISH DRAGON,” a snapshot of modern China as a nod to the Chinese folk tale Aladdin.

“Tread Dread” (踩踏恐惧)

I’ve been at this a long time. Too long. Almost 1/3 of my life on these tired streets—mostly over by old Route Dupleix (An Fu Lu today) and Avenue Joffre (Huaihai Middle Road). I guess the variety of what I see makes it more bearable, allows for a suspension of disbelief about what I really do. And then there’s my partner in crime here. When it comes down to the nuts and bolts of it all, I’m glad I chose this path. It could be worse. Drivers in Shanghai are loose, but it’s nothing compared to Beijing. Let’s put it this way: if Shanghai is Warhol’s Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster), then Beijing is his Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times. Absolutely brutal. I stay safe though, making liberal use of my headlights and my “Shanghai hello” (a honk and the, uh, one-finger wave), especially when I’m on the third-level gaojia. Take a good long look. Most people don’t see my frontside for long. I give a hello, and then a quick goodbye with a trail of smoke and the smell of burnt rubber left in the air. I leave behind only my tread dread, my haze craze.

52*52cm

TFT display, acrylic painting, paper collage, teakwood

Art for sale : kiwi@island6.org 

island6 - Tread Dread

“Chapi Chapo” (肖皮查波)

Where did all the people go? How often do you get an entire beach to yourself? My oh my, oo lala. What do you do when your world is a playground, open to all possibility? Why, you make your dreams come true of course! It’s just that sometimes your dreams are simple, like lounging around in a bathing suit while warm air breezes off the water and around your body. Simple isn’t always easy though. Example: Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning Drawing”, an artwork through which Rauschenberg completely erased one of de Kooning’s original drawings, framed it, and presented it as his own work. Simple? Yes. Easy? For no one. de Kooning liked his drawing; Rauschenberg burned through 15 erasers and one month to get the job done. The point here is that for security (and especially for security through freedom) sacrifices must be made. Sartre would say that freedom is necessary, that it is just another word for existence. But he would also agree that it is damning, carrying with it responsibilities for all the world. When Sartre gets into your head, playing on the beach feels less like a holiday and more like possibilities being consumed.

120*120cm

RGB LED display, sand & resin coating, teakwood

Art for sale : kiwi@island6.org 

island6 - Chapi Chapo

“Chapi Chapo” (肖皮查波)

Where did all the people go? How often do you get an entire beach to yourself? My oh my, oo lala. What do you do when your world is a playground, open to all possibility? Why, you make your dreams come true of course! It’s just that sometimes your dreams are simple, like lounging around in a bathing suit while warm air breezes off the water and around your body. Simple isn’t always easy though. Example: Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning Drawing”, an artwork through which Rauschenberg completely erased one of de Kooning’s original drawings, framed it, and presented it as his own work. Simple? Yes. Easy? For no one. de Kooning liked his drawing; Rauschenberg burned through 15 erasers and one month to get the job done. The point here is that for security (and especially for security through freedom) sacrifices must be made. Sartre would say that freedom is necessary, that it is just another word for existence. But he would also agree that it is damning, carrying with it responsibilities for all the world. When Sartre gets into your head, playing on the beach feels less like a holiday and more like possibilities being consumed.

102*102cm

Price inquiry: camilla@island6.org

island6.org/chapichapo

“Anywhere You Meet A Horizon” (划过地平线)

Anywhere you might meet a horizon say hello to it! Maybe raise a flag so that others can see it from beyond the curve that separates your small patch of earth from so many others. In every direction you look and see a horizon line you can wonder if there might be someone the perfect distance away in that direction that your horizon line is theirs, just from the opposite side. The strangest thing about the horizon all around you is it stays the same distance away. You’ll move around your whole life in the same approximate bubble of visible land, never knowing for certain what’s on the other side of any particular one. Could be true love or disaster, fame or fiery death. Maybe someone who would’ve been your best friend is just beyond where you can see, lazily floating and paddling around, waiting for you to come watch and then introduce yourself. Maybe you can explain why people do what they do all around the world and throughout all of time, they really just want to know what’s over the next hill.

192.8*72.7cm

RGB LED display, Giclée print face-mounted on plexiglass, stainless steel 

Art for sale : kiwi@island6.org 

island6 - Anywhere You Meet A Horizon

“Fabulous Vegas-cum-Pachinko Neon” (神话般的维加斯帕金科氖灯)

When a young Josh Baskin fed a coin into an usual antique arcade machine and made a wish to “be big”, he had no idea what was about to happen. Tom Hanks’ character in Big got everything he asked for thanks to Zoltar the fortune teller that day and the rest is history. That movie was made in 1988 and is just one example of a life-changing moment. Today, people all over the world experience those split seconds in their own ways. You could meet the man or woman of your dreams later this afternoon. Or have an important bit of news delivered tomorrow morning that you weren’t expecting. You could simply leave the house two minutes later one day and experience a whole different outcome than if you’d have left on time. It’s all a gamble. One big throw of the dice. While a pachinko game in Japan won’t change your life, they are certainly just as popular and attractive as the slot machines in Las Vegas or Macau. The mechanical devices are just as hypnotic as what the West would call a ‘fruit machine’ and offer as much escapism to the punter. They are also highly customizable allowing for owners and aficionados to express their creativity. The aim of the game is to capture as many balls as possible, which can then be exchanged for prizes so there’s no chance of getting rich from a pachinko. But don’t hate the player, hit the jackpot. You only get one life, it’s your chance to be big like Baskin. Let it all slot into place.

120*120cm

RGB LED display, acrylic painting on Plexiglass, teak wood

Art for sale : kiwi@island6.org 

island6 - Fabulous Vegas

“Ping Ping An An​​​​​​​” (平平安安)

“Architecture should speak of its time and place but yearn for timelessness.” – Frank Gehry

The Queen of the Orient, Paris of the East, The City of Shen (申城), our dear Shanghai goes by many eclectic names. No matter what you call it, the city on the sea attracts a certain type of energy that has the power to move you deeply. No matter where you come from, this is home. Here you’re safe and sound from whatever you were running from. Now it’s just living. And it’s easy in a scene where old meets new at every corner. Hungarian-Slovak architect László Hudec, commonly known as Shanghai’s master builder, designed over 60 buildings in the thirty years he lived here. His creativity resulted in many of the art deco architecture that still stands to this day. Hudec’s masterpiece was the tallest building in the metropolis, until the 1980s, the twenty-two story Park Hotel Shanghai on Nanjing Road. A walk down the bund might as well be a walk through time. Western-style buildings, Neoclassical to Beaux-Arts to Gothic to Baroque, sky high edifices, traditional Shikumen lane houses, It’s all here. All you could ever ask for just a few blocks near Bao Ren Long (保仁弄). Although some say the street is already removed, the feelings evoked when walking past remain.

99.5*75.5cm

Gongbi painting (工笔) on Hahnemühle watercolor paper, teakwood

Art for sale : kiwi@island6.org 

island6 - Ping Ping An An

“Seize The Means Of Pollination” (抓住授粉的方法)

Graffiti. When we strip the layers of painted meaning down to the brick, what are we left with? What were those early experimenters in 1983 New York City trying to express? The underground nature of the medium lends itself to an energetic feeling of wild reformation, of a mode that subverts not only the artworld, but those other forces of colonization, greed, and evil present in all corners of discourse. Were the imaginative needs of those artists so different from those of their forefathers? Is the Peranakan pattern on this vase any less graffiti than what’s painted onto the wall across the street? Maybe it boils down to a difference in the how rather than the what, a difference of expression rather than one of content. We’ve heard well-dressed people discuss in hushed yet excited tones heavy with the smell of expensive champagne that graffiti is a return to something primitive, to a preliterate time of big Gods and little gods, that it’s a “good investment…”. And so far, they’ve been right, but only because with a snap of their fingers and a clap of their hands, they’ve decided this is how it would be.

66*47cm

RGB LED display, acrylic painting, sound sensor, teak wood

Art for sale : kiwi@island6.org 

island6 - Seize The Means Of Pollination

“21st Century Romance” (21世纪罗曼史)

We didn’t have much. A beat up 1996 Nissan Sentra. A suitcase full of dirty clothes. Every time we opened the car door, an overflow of fast-food wrappers and cups. Bottles and cans clanking noisily as if punctuating our lifestyle. We’d cruise from this motel to that. From that restaurant to this. At least we had each other. An emotional roller coaster, and we’d ridden the length of it as one. I looked at my companion, and brushed her gently with the back of my fingers. We had just arrived. I reached down to lift her top up. I booted her up. Launched the scripts. Every keystroke like a brush on a canvas—It was beautiful the way we worked together. We perused every available connection sniffing for credit card numbers, personal identification, and anything we could use to make a buck. No matter how little or how much we found, we had each other.  Great rooms, best rates, I’m not interested. Wifi, that’s the ticket.

52*52cm

RGB LED display, acrylic painting on Plexiglass, teak wood

Art for sale : kiwi@island6.org 

island6 - 21st Century Romance

“Pinwheel” (风车)

Endless debates on whether color or drawing is more important within painting were definitive in the history of art ever since the Renaissance. According to the Venetian traditions, the more sensual “colore” was the true nature of mosaics, frescoes and oil painting. On the contrary, Florentine Renaissance artists believed in the superiority of “disegno” or drawing as being rational and scientific in its approach to perspective and design of composition. This opposition was that of nature and intellect, observation and invention. Yet, the two elements couldn’t exist without each other… thought the Renaissance master, until somebody came and got rid of drawing, this skeleton of painting to see the flesh of paint live free like the rainbow of cosmic gas in the vacuum of space. The scientific approach was finally passed on to the observers of nature when the impressionists started questioning what the eyes can see. They saw the whole spectrum of colors of Goethe’s color wheel as building blocks of vision and painting. It’s only one step away from abstraction. But the question here is, having let design go, when do we say good bye to the illusion of color?

39*39cm

RGB LED display, one-way glass, teakwood

Art for sale : kiwi@island6.org 

island6 - Pinwheel

“Wild Blue” (野蓝)

It’s a #blue#butterfly day, and the #sky is such because particles in Earth’s atmosphere scatter sunlight in all directions. In 1871, Lord Rayleigh published a paper explaining this phenomenon in great detail. The optical phenomenon known as Rayleigh Scattering, refers to the dispersing of #electromagnetic radiation, such as #light, by particles of a smaller wavelength. Out of all the colors, blue light travels as the smallest waves and results in that wild blue presented on the skies each day. Join the dance of the one-day butterflies, the mythological nymphs, enchanting triplets twirling in the blue heavens. The word for butterfly in formal Greek is “psyche”, as it’s believed to be the soul of the dead. It’s also the name of a mortal woman who was released from death by #Zeus and granted immortality. Psyche’s mythological image in ancient art is portrayed with grand butterfly wings. Freed from death, the body of the soul flutters joyously into the forever blue.

51*51cm
Art for sale contact camilla@island6.org
https://island6.org/wildblue

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The amazing and futuristic Shanghai - Shanghai Tower 上海市

Shanghai is known as “The Pearl of Asia” and “The Paris of the East”. It’s a city of youth, commerce, and an international beat that runs through each side street and riverwalk.