The holiday season is here once again!! All the stores along 5th Avenue and Soho are dressed up for the holidays, with their display window mannequins all decked out in holiday clothing and gear. Whether its a snow yeti or nutcracker figurines or white-winged angels, the holiday store displays all signal one thing: it’s the holidays!! I love going window shopping especially this time of year, because all the windows are so pretty and intricate.

Although one might not think of store window displays as art, that quality is highlighted for the holiday season. This year, Saks Fifth Avenue has a series of iconic windows featuring their mascot, the Saks Yeti. Each window depicts a scene from the Saks Yeti’s life, from his humble beginnings as an unappreciated snowmaker in Siberia to his starring role as a true snowflake artist in New York. The heartwarming story is coupled with a daily 3D light show projected onto the side of the Saks building on Fifth Avenue. Using 3D projection through 6 projectors, the light show is truly a sight to behold. The light show and the Saks Yeti “exhibit” will be on view all through the holiday season.

I highly recommend you guys to check it out, especially if you are looking forward to getting into the holiday spirit! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! 🙂

Here’s the light show spectacular: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8vwrz4fZJw&list=UU_97RTgW61rYhBo46f1PsuA#t=99

–Joanna Huang

Every day I am reminded how lucky I am to live in New York City. First of all, because of the city’s energy, second of all, the interesting people I meet, and last but not least, the art! That’s certainly not a comprehensive list, but you get the point–New York City is definitely one of the biggest cities for art. A few weeks ago, me and Karen decided to use our Thursday club hours to visit an art gallery. I had heard about a super cool super awesome infinity mirror room a gallery down in Chelsea. After some research, it turned out to be part of Yayoi Kusama’s gallery exhibition, “I Who Have Arrived in Heaven” (on view until December 21). Apparently, the line was supposed to be an over 2 hour wait on average to get into the infinity room, but we just wanted to check out the place even though we might not have time to get on the line.

When we got there, the line was indeed very long, so we decided to see some of her paintings in the same gallery exhibition and the other infinity mirror room instead. What we saw was pretty interesting. Up until that point, the only thing I knew about Kusama was her crazy polka dot motif. It turns out that she has many other motifs in her work, including Egyptian style profiles, eyes, and faces. To be honest, when I first saw her paintings, I thought to myself, “Wow, what does this even mean? It makes no sense.” All of her paintings give off a hallucinatory vibe because it doesn’t focus on one thing at a time. Everything seems pretty much thrown on the canvas all at once. After studying one of her paintings for a while, I came to the conclusion that Kusama must be very connected to her subconscious, because the things that she draws look so random and spontaneous. I just kept thinking, “Is this what she sees when she looks at the world? Is this always happening in her mind? Like how does she even think of this stuff???” Although looking passively at her work may give you the idea that she does not have any meaning behind it, I think the idea may be to make the viewer stop and think with their own mind to come up with a meaning that relates to them and speaks to them.

Besides seeing Kusama’s paintings, we also visited her infinity mirror room, “Love is Calling,” which features a mirror lined room that has glowing, orb-like sea urchin tentacles coming out of the ceiling and the floor. Combined with the mirrors surrounding the rooms on all sides, the viewer is given the illusion of an infinite world where there are tentacles as far as the eye can see. This visual effect is paired with a audio component, where Kusama herself recites a love poem of hers in Japanese. It is interesting to note that the New York Times says the tentacles are phallus symbols, but the whole time I was in that room, that never crossed my mind once. I just thought that the visual effect that the ever-changing colors on the tentacles gave were very vibrant and symbolized the fickle and colorful nature of loveand life. 

Even though I was not able to see the mirror room that literally everyone is talking about, I still enjoyed myself very much at Kusama’s gallery exhibit. It gave me fresh insight to what art means in the contemporary world and also showed me how art is defined differently for each and every artist. The viewer does not only see art through the artist’s eyes, but their own eyes as well, and that is what art is all about.

I recommend everyone to check out the exhibition review on New York Times if you want to learn more, or even go to the exhibit and experience it yourself! It is on view at the David Wirner Gallery until December 21, so hurry! 🙂

Here is the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/arts/design/yayoi-kusama-i-who-have-arrived-in-heaven.html?_r=0

–Joanna Huang

Bonjour, tout le monde!

On our class visit to the Museum of Modern Art, I was very interested in the René Magritte exhibition, titled, “The Mystery of the Ordinary” and features his works from 1926-1938. Magritte was one of the famous Surrealism painters whose work pointed out the inconsistencies in language and visual representation, characterizing the surrealist movement. The art of the time period that the exhibition focuses on featured violent interpretations and innovative ways of thinking about reality and society.

“An object encounters its image, an object encounters its name.”–René Magritte

The idea that Magritte puts forth in this quote is evident in many of his paintings. One work that captured my attention was titled, “La Clef des songes,” (The Interpretation of Dreams). In the painting, images are paired with words that appear to have no correlation to the image, all except the panel in the lower right hand corner. There, Magritte painted a suitcase and below it, he writes, “the valise,” which is both a French and English word for suitcase. The other panels are all paired with non-sensical words that do not accurately describe the object above them. This interesting juxtaposition of language and image is one of Magritte’s signature ideas: words are constructed by society to describe objects, but the objects do not describe the names. We can name the object “the horse” to be “the door,” and the object would still be the same. (Also interesting to note: this painting is the same one that appears on the cover of the text, “Way of Seeing” by John Berger that we read for class.)

“An object is not so possessed of its name that one cannot find for it another which suits it better.”–René Magritte

Another work that attracted me is one that points out the distinction between painting and sculpture. Entitled, “L’évidence éternelle” (The Eternally Obvious), it depicts five parts of a woman’s body in separate canvases. The message behind the work was that this series of five paintings were blurring the lines between painting and sculpture, since it calls to our attention the use of the 3rd dimension outside each individual canvas. Seeing this work brought to my mind our trip to the Rox Gallery to see the exhibit, Delusions, where one of the photographs featured two nudes with lampshades over their heads (Regretfully, I don’t have a picture). In that work, the artist was bringing up the idea of the nude being an object if the face is covered, since it eliminates any special or distinctive properties. Magritte’s “L’évidence éternelle” reminds me of it because in four of the five canvases, the person is unrecognizable, but if seen as a whole, the five canvases form one picture of a unique person.

–Joanna Huang

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has always been a personal favorite of mine. Having already been there several times before for high school projects, I had always thought of it in an academic sense (I had one teacher who made the class go on a scavenger hunt in the museum). I never really thought of going to the museum as something that one could do for fun as a pastime. Through our recent trip there, I discovered a newfound perspective of museum-going. Walking through and looking at all the exhibits can be a sort of therapeutic and relaxing experience especially when you’re with friends.

My group, which consisted of Alex, Karen, Nick, and Professor Eversley, wanted to view the Balthus: Cats and Girls–Paintings and Provocations from the get-go, but the journey to get there actually might have been more fun than the exhibit itself. First of all, my horrible navigation skills got us lost for a while, but on the way, we got to walk through many interesting exhibits, including the Egyptian Wing, the American Wing, and the European Art Wing.

The Egyptian wing was pretty interesting, especially the Temple of Dendur, where the entire hall is lit up by the sunlight to create a really relaxing and nice atmosphere. The light beautifully emphasizes the structure in the middle–a piece of the Temple of Dendur from Egypt. On the past trips that I’ve made to the Met, I never realized that the structure was not complete. Some parts where the original pieces could not be found were substituted by plaster molds to create the temple that we see today in the Met. I think it’s very impressive that archaeologists are able to reconstruct a whole structure using only fragments from thousands of years ago.

After visiting Egypt, we walked through the American Wing and saw some monumental paintings of the colonial period. I noticed some of the same paintings that we had seen in the Brooklyn Museum on the “Macaulay Night at the Museum” event, namely the portrait of George Washington and the famous “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” I was momentarily confused, because I thought, there can’t possibly be two of the same painting, right? That was before I realized that some of the paintings displayed in the exhibit were copies of the originals hanging in the Brooklyn Museum. Before this, I thought there was only one copy of each painting–guess not, huh?

When we finally got to the Balthus: Cats and Girls exhibit, I was so excited to get to see the works of this artist that Professor Eversley liked. Little did I know, the focus of this particular exhibition was of Balthus’s works centering around his obsession of young girls and cats. The first ever picture I saw of Balthus’s was titled, “Therese Dreaming,” and features a young girl, around the age of 11, lounging with one leg standing up on the chair, leaned back with her eyes closed, and arms on her head. This description might paint a relaxing Sunday afternoon scene in your mind, but that was not what Balthus’s interpretation of the scene turned out to be. I was shocked at the sexualization of this young preteen girl, whose undergarments were clearly and noticeably visible as the center focus of the painting. To be honest, I was a bit shocked that this piece, which was considered  child pornography by some art critics, was viewed as fine art. This first work that I saw essentially gave me a blunt introduction to the artistic vision of Balthus and desensitized me so that I was able to view his other artworks with this newfound piece of knowledge and exposure in mind. The other works in the exhibit were pretty interesting as well, but I still found myself shocked by the themes displayed in the first painting.

Overall, the spontaneous trip to the Met was fun, and allowed me to see what I hadn’t noticed before. I found the simple act of walking and wandering about the exhibits to be such a relaxing and fun experience that I’m thinking about going to the museum more often in my free time! Special thanks to Professor Eversley for giving us so many fun facts and insight to the artwork!

—Joanna Huang

Recently, I paid a visit to Grand Central Terminal for the first time ever since moving to New York City from China 12 years ago. Before this visit I had always thought, “Big deal, it’s just a train station,” but I was very wrong. Grand Central is not “just” a train station, it is so much more. It is at the center of one of the grandest cities of the world; it is not simply a place, but an experience.

That morning, I bought myself a cuppa and a bagel and just people-watched for a good half hour, all the while soaking in the energy and buzz of hundreds of people moving and hurrying about. Being in the center of all this activity made me feel alone in a city of more than 8 million people. It was a truly inspiring and relaxing experience that made me fall in love with the city even more. Then, as I was just about to leave, I noticed a series of art works in light boxes all along some of the walls of the dining concourse. At closer inspection, I saw that these were papercuts placed on top of light boxes. After a quick Google search, it turned out that these artworks were part of a celebratory exhibition, called “On Paper,” to honor the centennial of the Grand Central Terminal. The exhibition features papercut works by artists Rob Ryan, Xin Song, Laura Cooperman, and Thomas Witte.

In particular, one of the works by Rob Ryan caught my eye. Entitled, “There Is Only Time,” the paper cut featured block-letter quotes as well as heartwarming scenes surrounding the central idea of time. When placed alongside each other, the papercuts read “There Is Only Time!” The four detailed panels came together to bring out the message that time is just time. It helps us to remember that we need to relax and stop thinking of time as “wrong time” or “right time,” “work time” or “play time.” We should just let go and relax so that we can stop being pressured and stressed out over such a simple thing as “time.” One of Ryan’s chief purposes of placing this art in the Grand Central Terminal was to remind people to take pleasure in life and its various moments, especially in a place where people are always mindlessly rushing about. He wanted his audience to connect with his work and realize that everything was going to be okay. Ryan’s quirky papercut artwork gave me a happy feeling when I look at the lovely and warm scenes that he depicts in the panels. One of the first thoughts that came into my mind was that I should “stop and smell the roses” more often to enjoy the beauty of life.

Looking at this piece of lovely and intricate piece of art soothed my mind and made me think about time as something that is not as intense or dramatic as we always make it out to be. It’s moments like these, when you are not rushing or worrying about losing time, that you make the most out of each moment that you have.

—Joanna Huang