1. How did you start making art?

I’ve been around it all my life. My dad was a painter and my mother is a ceramist, so it was encouraged early on…
I got interested in film and photography when I was about 15, discovered all the cool things that you could do with the camera and in a dark room in high school, and that’s what I ended up studying and practicing before considering/making art at the graduate level.

2. Briefly describe your art from the perspective of what it could tell us about you?

The collage and installation that I’m interested in now is not anything I’d have considered interesting four years ago. I suppose that means the way I think about making work has undergone a big shift.
The collages use ordinary materials and they parody the fashion of miniature painting that has become a sought after genre of contemporary painting from Pakistan, especially in the international art market. Its even considered a movement of sorts. There are some amazing artists developing their work in this way, but I was more interested in the way that the contemporary miniature has become fetishized. Also what it implies in terms of taste, and painterly skill and all the rest is an important thing for me. The collages were also inspired by certain political events that happened in Pakistan last year.
The other thing I am really interested in is the urban kitsch of Lahore, which is where the wallpaper made from posters comes in. I’m fascinated by the recycled imagery, the sloppy photoshop work, and the romanticism. This says a lot about the culture especially in relation to what is happening there politically, and I’m very interested in using that in my work.

3. What experiences have most influenced your choice of subject matter medium and style?

Growing up in Lahore in the 80’s. Moving between the developing and the developed world from a young age. Discovering my grandfather’s archive of photographs and travelogues at 12. All these things are pretty significant with recent projects.

4. Is your formal or informal training as an artist useful? How?

That’s a really good question. Everyone is marked by the ideologies of the institutions that they have been associated with. It is useful to some degree because it gives you a framework and structure, particularly useful at a basic level. But it is probably more important to undo that training, or develop your work beyond what they’ve set you up for.

5. Does your work reflect issues in yourself, in society or community?

Probably all of the above.

6. Do you appreciate culturally specific works of art? If so how does your personal and cultural background show up in your work?

In a way every work of art is specific to a culture and time and place, whether its Gordon Matta Clark splitting a house in two pieces, or Yinka Shonibare’s Victorian dresses that he commissions a seamstress to make with African fabric.
If you mean in terms of heritage and cultural background, I’m not sure how that works without getting clichéd in a world and an art system which is pretty international and lets face it, has it an audience that is quite jaded. But some artists have been very clever at dealing with these issues in their work, which is pretty cool and inspiring.
Yes, my personal and cultural background does play a part in my work. The collage work specifically deals with miniature painting and the poster’s with a particular kind of Lahori kitch… Before I dealt with these things and used them in my work a lot of people tended to project an ethnicity that I hadn’t intended, regardless, so it can be a pretty tricky thing.

7. Is there anything you would like to say about your local art scene or the international art market, art education, and or system for art exhibition?

A lot. It would exceed the word count for this interview so I’ll maybe I should start a blog or write a pamphlet.

8. How does your current portfolio fit into the rest of your body of work?

I’m still dealing with a new conceptual direction that I started last year, so its quite different from work I was developing in film and photography and also in terms of what its about. But there are probably a lot formal similarities that you can see as thread.

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1. How did you start making art?

I grew up in an intellectual’s family that never kept me distanced from, if not very close to, art scenes. Meanwhile, having lived among commoners in the age before the market boom and witnessed their desires, ambitions and personal disasters, I have had a life that is dense enough for telling a vivid story. Initially, I made art only as a compliment to those “major” things more closely related to my professional interests – my literary writings (illustrations to The Fireworks of Chang’an), architectural researches (an interpretative project about Battery Park City, New York), curating projects (Chinese Gardens for Living, Germany), and so on – but I soon found they could stand alone to be a different kind of stories. My works may be appropriately categorized as the “visionary” but cannot be completely separated from the “necessary”: on one side there is my intellectual curiosity and on the other is my instinct out of real life experience.

2. Briefly describe your art from the perspective of what it could tell us about you?

My art is what they called “art in general,” where the concept of “work” is intentionally kept ambivalent. To put this in another way, my works pay less attention to media, subject or “authorship” than to the larger context where they are created. This concerns an exploration of the artist/curator/designer overlap – the act of sifting through a scholar’s mindset for vivid stories, or of exhaustive inventorying of things for a personal history emerged out of world-making. Like-minded, I do not mind being called a scholar, a curator, a novelist or an artist, yet with the only wish to be consistent in addressing artistic, architectural or urbanistic issues as a whole. For my artistic pursuits I prefer to be a “Renaissance Man” than to be a specialist.

3. What experiences have most influenced your choice of subject matter, medium and style?

As mentioned above, I have lived a real commoner’s life. Such a life can never be furnished with a thin veneer. Nor need it be too “avant-garde.” As Chinese always believe, there is a more “natural” attitude towards artistic creation as long as you could maintain an appropriate balance between the articulated and the “chance-upon.” For the above reasons the (Chinese) “garden” become an important framing concept for all my art. My professional trainings render more affinity to space-making as well as a Constructivist appearance for my work. But they are also tangible, detailed and story-telling. My world-making strategies grew out simultaneously of sociological concerns and of aesthetic appeals. They imply not only collaged images, but a softer and more idiosyncratic approach to the generic enormity of the built environment.

4. Is your formal or informal training as an artist useful? How?

I learned essential art skills and most common senses from my grandparents and parents, artist neighbors and friends, not from any professional training. In fact I have found that this is very useful because it taught you why to make art on top of how.

5. Does your work reflect issues in yourself, in society or community? What would you say is the purpose for making art?

Yes, and it has to. Or we cannot imagine other reasons why we would need such a thing. But it also need do so strategically. Against two popular myths about “creativity” and about “societal merits,” I want to argue that art should get neither too close to nor too far from social appeals. For example, I made a series of visionary architectural drawings, wrapped up by a fabricated medieval tale, to illustrate my reflection on the current Chinese urbanist discussion. The story needs be novel enough to refresh people’s thoughts and distance them from various cultural and professional clichés. Meanwhile, it still needs be appropriately supported by arguments and premises that are generally accepted by most scholars in the related field.

6. Do you appreciate culturally specific works of art? If so how does your personal and cultural background show up in your work?

In my opinions, it is healthy not to be too self-conscious about your cultural identity. As an artist and author living in New York City for most of the year, I simply cannot be blind to what happens under your nose. In addition to my New York researches, for example, I have had my own visionary reinterpretation/intervention of Battery Park City (say, a city hooligan’s unexpected visit to the banker’s backyard, which is against the initial wishes of the planner). The topic about two contested views of urban environment is simply becoming universal, immediate and not bound to your cultural background. On the other hand, you need be persistent on your own approach and perspective. I recently translated Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York into Chinese and I particularly like his idea of “retrospective manifesto”: as a cultural outsider may help your theoretic perfection of the ready-made reality. The only condition is that you cannot be both onshore and drifting away.

7. Is there anything you would like to say about your local art scene or the international art market, art education, and or system for art exhibition?

So far, I am a beneficiary of such a system, not its victim, so I am probably not in a good position to make very objective and critical comments. In general, I think that contemporary art should open its door to a wider variety of audience. As my New York photography series suggests, our visual culture now presents a kind of peculiar “translucency” that is optically intriguing yet politically uncertain. The openness that it reveals is somehow still an illusion. The in-between status is aesthetically interesting, but there also lurks a danger that it leads to nowhere.

8. How does your current portfolio fit into the rest of your body of work?

They are highly correlated though they may look very different. As stated, my works can be summarized as a variety of different representation of “gardens.” As a subject matter, the “garden” first of all embodies an interdisciplinary, trans-scale approach, as opposed to a simple division of the physical reality into humane construct versus regional operation. Despite the popular impression that a garden might satisfy only trivial horticultural interests, as an artistic notion the “garden” introduces a phenomenological view of the built environment that is especially meaningful in our rapidly urbanized world. To design a “garden” necessitates a synthesis of numerous things: not only structure but also infrastructure, not only schemes and ideas, but also materials and textures, not only the static composition but also an eidetic memory, not only a top-down conception but also a bottom-up process of implementation. To perceive a “garden” will require a flexible and liminal perspective, in which solid, triumphal spaces are often collapsed into indefinite and intimate experiences. Altogether my works form a complete typology of “garden space” as embodied in today’s architectural practices.

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1. How did you start making art?

My initial educational background was in the sciences. I was introduced to photography as an optional subject at my University in India. From what I remember, the class shared one camera and two rolls of film for the entire semester! Despite the meager resources, the class introduced me to photography and the possibilities of communicating ideas visually.

2. Briefly describe your art from the perspective of what it could tell us about you?

My work explores the experience of navigating between multiple cultures. Being born in England, growing up in India and now living in the United States, my varied background influences my point of view and opinions.

Drawing on my experience as a young woman growing up in India after a childhood in England, the portfolio “Bollywood Satirized” explores my own rejection of certain traditional women’s roles in Indian society, after experiencing more equality in England.

In “An Indian from India,” I look at the other “Indian.” I play on my own “otherness,” using photographs of Native Americans from the late Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Century that perpetuated and reinforced stereotypes. I find similarities in how the Nineteenth and early Twentieth century photographers of Native Americans looked at what they called the primitive natives, in ways that is similar to the colonial gaze of the Nineteenth century British photographers working in India.

In the project “The Virtual Immigrant,” I explore the ways that workers in customer service call centers in India similarly navigate between cultures. They bifurcate their dress, speech and lives between the culture where they work, India and the western culture within the workplace they exist within. They seem to virtually live between cultures without leaving their country of origin.

My latest project, Re-Generations, explores the viewer’s connection to time and the warping of cultures over time. I collapse the presumed progression of time, so the past and present, Indian and Western appear here in the same virtual space.

3. What experiences have most influenced your choice of subject matter, medium and style?

I have long been interested in photography because of its connection to reality and our perception and assumptions about that supposed reality. My images often start with existing photographic material (Bollywood Satirized, An Indian from India, Re-Generations) that I then reinterpret to communicate my concepts.

4. Is your formal or informal training as an artist useful? How?

My later formal training as an artist gave me the technical skills to be able to communicate visually and the conceptual skills to understand what I was trying to communicate. An informal supportive group of photographers and friends also gave me the same support. My past background in mathematics has enabled me to easily learn technology.

5. Does your work reflect issues in yourself, in society or community?

My work definitely reflects my experiences and my interests. It explores issues that are important to me and also transcend to a larger audience. (An Indian from India, The Virtual Immigrant and more recently Re-Generation)

5a. What would you say is the purpose for making art?

To communicate ideas and points of view that we may not have considered and for this work to seamlessly intertwine both the aesthetic and conceptual/political.

6. Do you appreciate culturally specific works of art? If so how does your personal and cultural background show up in your work?

I appreciate work that has something to say and has a strong visual component. I often find that the work that is the most intriguing to me is work by immigrants that reflect their experience of living between cultures. Examples are Hiroshi Sugimoto, Abelardo Morel and Shirin Neshat. My own cultural background does show up in my work and I try to frame that within a more universal voice based on the concepts that I am exploring.

7. Is there anything you would like to say about your local art scene or the international art market, art education, and or system for art exhibition?

I think there is a strong need for a fine art photography program within a university context in India. This would enable artists to appreciate, understand and apply the history of photography and imaging technology, in order to expand the range of photographic work being done within the country.

8. How does your current portfolio fit into the rest of your body of work?

Re-Generations is a bit of a departure from my recent work. First, it is more collaborative than any of my previous projects and the final work is also more open ended in terms of what it conveys. Receiving a MacColl Johnson Fellowship allowed me to experiment and explore a number of ideas. Not having to predefine the work for funding allowed the parameters to be more undefined.

The ephemeral animated movies are a combination of a scan of an archival image and recent photographs of three generations of women, which magically flow one into another.

As we know, flipping through a family album, we become more cognizant of the histories and memories of our and other families. Using digital technology, I reorient the viewer’s connection to time, as I collapse the presumed progression of its borders, so the past and present appear here in the same virtual space.

These animations weave in and out of moments in time, allowing the viewer to simultaneously ponder the history, future and aging of the subjects. This malleability leaves the viewer to wonder where the past and present overlap and warp. Here, history is distorted, evoking a new dimension of memories, which is uniquely digital.

To see more of Annu’s work, visit www.annumatthew.com

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1. How did you start making art?

As a child I was suffering from asthma, so instead of playing outside with friends I would rather stay home alone and draw. And maybe I have also been influenced by my mother, who was doing oil paintings. At the age of 15, I expected to go to art high school. I wished to study there mostly because I just don’t have interest studying any other subject.

These days, by the time I have finished one piece of art a concrete vision of the next one has already formed in my mind. So I just have to give a shape to this new vision. One finished piece leads to the next, like a chain reaction. So it is rather difficult for me to draw an exact line between where one thing ends and something else begins.

2. Briefly describe your art from the perspective of what it could tell
us about you?

Central to my art is the collecting of “small particles” from which to create a shape or a particular atmosphere. These individual particles resemble the emotions, experiences, or moments that make up our lives.

My art also revolves around notions such as pain, fear, birth, or death. I have been gathering these notions as fragments to construct my own identity, I guess.

Recently I have achieved the maturity required to work directly with the motif of “the human”, which I had been consciously avoiding before.

Maybe this is because I am getting older, or because I perceive the world more clearly now.

Human beings start out incomplete at birth and finish their lives as a perfect corpse. The body, which consists of an almost infinite number of cells and substances, spends its time surrounded by equally astronomical numbers of emotions. This fact reminds me that my own existence – and everybody else’s as well – is as big as the universe, since in my view these “particles” are comparable with the atoms that make up the universe.

My task as an artist is to not overlook these “particles” and to carefully give them shape.

It is like exploring what makes up my own particular life and what directs my future decisions.

It is possible to imagine my existence being replaced with the universe. My perception of the universe will disappear with my death and all will be returned to the universe.

3. What experiences have most influenced your choice of subject matter,
medium and style?

My choice of subject matter has been informed to a great extent by the following two experiences:

When doing research for my project, I had the opportunity to attend an autopsy class at the medical faculty of the local university. When I saw all the dead bodies that had been donated for the medical students’ practical training I fainted.

Before I started with the hearse project in 2005, I visited a hearse factory to do some interviews. There were also cars waiting to be repaired, which means they had already carried dead bodies. I accidentally opened the door of one of those used cars and was immediately surrounded by the stench of death that had filled the inside of the car.

It was the starting point to experience “death” so very closely, which I had never felt so realistically until then. At this moment conflicting feelings, such as a sense of freedom and at the same time a sense of the emptiness of life, both fear of and a yearning for death, have been implanted deep inside of me. And I also realized that, paradoxical as it may seem, gazing upon death means staring at life.

As for the choice of medium and style – first there is a vision, then I look for the appropriate medium and style.

Although I could say that every experience influences me and my art work.

4. Is your formal or informal training as an artist useful? How?

The formal training taught me practical things – useful techniques, an understanding of the available materials, how to discuss about art, etc. However, the understanding of myself as an artist developed after graduation through autonomous activity.

Since I get the vision first, basically by making art, many physical, technical, and practical difficulties arise in the process. The hardest thing is to maintain a certain level, physically and mentally, and to retain the motivation to make the work resemble the initial vision as closely as possible.

I choose media that allow me to express this vision most effectively. This can be sculpture or drawing, painting, installation, video, or performance, for example. I also often mix different media and styles.

If a style works well, this can be an immediate and strong success. Sometimes, however, it can be quite a challenge for me, for example, when working with sculpture I may have lost the feeling for the materials due to lack of practice, or when working with the computer I may need a lot of patience until I master some new software.

Solving these problems is a great training for me as an artist, and at the same time I feel that I am growing as a human being.

5. Does your work reflect issues in yourself, in society or community?
What would you say is the purpose for making art?

It may be difficult to see whether it is reflected directly in my work.
However, since I am living in society and am part of the community, I might say that these things are reflected indirectly in my work.

Art does not have the same quick-acting influence as the entertainment media.
I think art works more like herbal medicine; you may feel the effects much later, but you feel them nonetheless.

I think that the purpose of making art is to repeatedly show the things that lie beyond one’s generation, which are actually visible yet seem invisible to many people and may have become forgotten. Thus art brings depth and wealth into life.

6. Do you appreciate culturally specific works of art? If so how does
your personal and cultural background show up in your work?

Yes, I do.
It is because each thing which man makes is very exciting and interesting, regardless of positive or negative. They can influence and reflect each other.
To me, both the things that are connected to the past and those connected to the future are like my contemporaries.
They have certainly influenced my art work, consciously or unconsciously.

7. Is there anything you would like to say about your local art scene or
the international art market, art education, and or system for art
exhibition?

As we know, the international art market has been damaged by the global financial crisis. It will probably work as a process of “natural selection” – not exactly natural, of course – for us artists, the art scene, and the art market.

However, I see this situation as a good opportunity for each of us to reconsider important issues such as the quality of art, the management of budgets, the selection of programs, artistic orientation or strategy, and maybe to solve these problems by using our imagination and creativity to the fullest.

8. How does your current portfolio fit into the rest of your body of work?

Actually, my works are all connected to each other in my view.
A new piece of work is always the summary of my previous work.

And I am especially satisfied with my current work, because I feel that my past work has been leading up to this vision and that I have achieved what I had wanted to express.
My current work, a series called “Milky Way”, is closest to what I wanted to express, the most honest and true representation of my vision.
Nothing is more dramatic than the process where a work and an artist charm each other, the distance narrowing, one assimilating the other.

Until recently, I actually worked very hard in the studio, therefore I looked again at my previous work after a long time.
When I discover messages in my past work which I have not noticed myself before it is like stumbling across a time capsule.
What will happen to my work 10 or 20 years from now, what kind of message will be received from my work at that time?

To see more of Mihoko’s work, including her video pieces, please visit: www.mihoko-ogaki.com

*Translated from Japanese by Sayaka Honsho
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1. How did you start making art?

As a child I was obsessed with construction and demolition, I could not tell them apart. I started out studying architecture; maybe it was the right thing to do, the right way to be correct and inline. But when I was 18, I met a painter in Rome, His name was John. I feel in love with him. I thought, yes, that’s who I am.

2. Briefly describe your art from the perspective of what it could tell
us about you?

I think a more interesting way to think about this question would be to list my influences. The list might start with David Bowie, the Velvet Underground, Madonna and leap to Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gerhard Richter than jump to Gustave Courbet, Turner and the writings of Edward Said.

3. What experiences have most influenced your choice of subject matter,
medium and style?

I straddle two cultures; I am an outsider in both. Where do I stand? I am close yet distant. I am never quite at ease.

4. Is your formal or informal training as an artist useful? How?

I think that re-arranging the family house as a child, moving the furniture, re-positioning the objects, that was probably my most important training. It allowed me a broad yet contained canvas.

5. Does your work reflect issues in yourself, in society or community?
What would you say is the purpose for making art?

I am enamored with the object. In an age where meditation is ubiquitous, I find the possibilities of the object extremely radical. It is irreducible in its materiality and uniqueness. In the end its power is in its reality. It is always now. At the same time mediation is constantly occurring, effecting how we see and experience the object, the now.

6. Do you appreciate culturally specific works of art? If so how does
your personal and cultural background show up in your work?

I appreciate any work of art that feels necessary. It could be a Shirin Neshat video or a jar of marbles by Tony Feher. The drive behind the work has to come through or else it is dead.

7. Is there anything you would like to say about your local art scene or
the international art market, art education, and or system for art
exhibition?

I find the contemporary art world (in New York) boring and depleting. There is so much else out there, outside this small school yard, market driven environment of who is the in crowd, who is cool and popular, who sells. You know it is funny, I went to my 20th high school reunion just to see who all these people were that I had given so much power to when I was 15. All the girls and boys I had crushes on, all the people I felt rejected by, all the people I was afraid of and looked to for validation. I found them all, and many of them hadn’t changed a bit (it was unnerving), I could clearly see how small and dull they were. The people that had seemed so attractive 20 years ago had turned out banal, common even ugly (I guess there beauty was only meant for high school). It was the people that were the geeks, un-cool and weird at 15, they had grown into their own substantive beauty. I had changed.

8. How does your current portfolio fit into the rest of your body of work?

I have chosen to include a couple of my large scale oil paintings and the piece “15 Untitled Men” on this website. I think Bowie says it all:

“I, I can remember
Standing by the wall
And the guns shot above our heads
And we kissed as though nothing could fall
And the shame was on the other side
Oh we can beat them forever and ever
Then we could be heroes, just for one day”

Excerpt from David Bowie’s “Heroes”, 1977

My hope is that both patriarchy, its failures, destruction, dislocation, instability and an insidious intoxicating beauty can all exist within the same pictorial frame. The work “15 Untitled Men”, is a series of gunpowder images that depict key power players of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), including Yasser Arafat, Menachem Begin, Hafez al-Assad, Pierre Gemayel. The series is continuing to grow with the inclusion of Ronald Reagan, George Bush Senior and Alexander Hague. The project is not a definitive lineup but is a growing curation of portraits. Scaled to the size of an embassy portrait, these “negative ghost images” -screened on mirrored stainless steel- posit a compressed Oedipal space of father, son and viewer. Violence is inscribed throughout on multiple levels of time, form and image. It is represented as both a past event (the burning of the eyes on the initial digital images) and an ever-present future possibility (the potential explosiveness of the gunpowder surface). Mirror polished stainless steel is a material used in place of glass in penal institutions and psychiatric units for safety precautions, thus it reflects the weight of social transgression and otherness. These “ghost” images literally explode and collapse the platonic integrity of any one individual painting. Each work is in a continuous alteration by the viewer – the reflection of the other in the eyes of the men.

A Special Kind of Wasteland: John Jurayj’s Paintings of Beirut by Shiva Balaghi (pdf)

The Art of Destruction by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie in The National (pdf)

John Jurayj in Daily Serving (pdf)

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