Photography in the 2103 Pulse Contemporary Art Fair, Part 2 of 2

Part 1 of this two-part Pulse report can be found here. Start there for introductory background and explanatory notes.

Michael Hoppen Gallery (here): Sohei Nishino, $16500. This booth was a solo show of Nishino's incredibly detailed bird's eye maps of major cities. Each one (Berlin below) is stitched together from hundreds of individual images, mixing landmarks, everyday buildings, streets, and rivers into a dense tapestry of shifting dimensions.

Black Square Gallery (here): Pablo Lehmann, $2800. This work was a photograph that had been Xacto knifed into a thin scrim of words, casting patterned shadows on the mat behind, playing with the physicality of the print.

Zemack Contemporary Art (here): Yuval Yairi, $9000. This work (actually a self-portrait) is a digital composite of hundreds of images, bending the dimensions of the room into an unreal spatial panorama.

Eric Firestone Gallery (here): John Messinger, $15000. While the buzz in this booth was around the monumental color portraits of Warhol, Basquiat and Haring by Tseng Kwong Chi, Messinger's gridded color abstraction of floating computer monitor blurs on the outside wall was more compelling.

Hous Projects (here): Haley Jane Samuelson, $3500. I liked the gothic fairy tale uncertainty of this girl clinging to the drooping limb.

Richard Levy Gallery (here): Manjari Sharma, $5450. While I had previously seen Sharma's ongoing series of Indian deities at a portfolio review, when all done up in gold frames, they are even more eye-poppingly bold and grandly majestic.

Mayer Fine Art (here): Victoria Gaitan, $5000. Bright candy colored whiteness, with an unsettling undercurrent of excess.

Otto Zoo (here): Marjolijn De Wit, $2000. This booth was a solo show of De Wit's collages of photography and ceramics, pairing landscapes with three-dimensional shards of pottery and industrial materials. The effect is both a clash of natural and man-made and a hard edged sculptural addition to a flat plane.

Taylor De Cordoba (here):  Danielle Nelson Mourning, $5200. I liked the misdirection in this self portrait, allowing the mirror to bend the visible space back in on itself.

FitzRoy Knox (here): Christine Flynn, $4600. The linear geometries of this image are augmented by a series of white striations that create a subtle screened effect over the left side of the image. Covered in a thin sheet of perfect resin, the end result has a physical, object quality.

Identity Art Gallery (here): Kurt Tong, $2500. A tricky tromp l'oeil mix of plastic birdcages, overgrown greenery, and a painted bamboo mural.

Kurt Tong, In Case It Rains In Heaven @Bekman

JTF (just the facts): A total of 16 color photographs, mounted without frames, and hung in the single room gallery space. All of the works are undated digital c-prints. The prints come in two sizes: 16x20 (in editions of 10) and 24x30 (in editions of 5). There are 4 of the large prints and 12 of the small prints in the show. A monograph of this body of work was published in 2011 by Kehrer (here) and is available from the gallery for $45. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: While many photographers have tried to capture the complex nature of China's recent economic boom and its accompanying cultural transformations by pointing their cameras at towering skyscrapers, endless factories, and expansive construction projects, Kurt Tong has opted for a simpler, smaller scale example of how attitudes have been changing. His photographs document the Joss paper objects burnt as offerings for the dead, showing just how far Western consumerism and luxury lifestyles have permeated traditional Chinese society.

Tong's straightforward still life images, set against black backgrounds, have the look and feel of commerical or stock photography: bright, crisp, and colorful. But the objects themselves tell a more complicated, anthropological story. While mourners once burned paper decorated to look like silver and gold ingots to help provide for the afterlife existence of their loved ones, the variety of items now being burned has expanded to match modern Chinese life, covering both the drearily mundane and the wildly aspirational. For the luxury minded, a large house with a guard and maid is available, as is a Ferrari with a chauffeur, a pair of servants, and a Louis Vuitton handbag. More practical objects include umbrellas, an electric fan, dentures, and a wheelchair. And depending on your view of what comes after death, the machine gun, the swimming trunks and snorkel, or the iPod Nano might make an appropriate gift for the recently deceased. It is clear that the need for "stuff" now extends far beyond the grave.

These objects (and the resulting photographs) have a kitchy, cartoonish feel, but as still lifes they are successful in being both attention grabbing and representative of a larger and more nuanced idea. The story they tell mixes old and new, succinctly showing one facet of how Chinese culture is evolving to incorporate new trends, pressures and mindsets.

Collector's POV: The prints in the show are priced at $800 and $1600, depending on size. Tong has no secondary market history, so gallery retail is the only option for interested collectors at this point. Prints can also be found on Bekman's 20x200 website (here) in various sizes and editions, all the way down to $24 for an 8x10 print.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Review: Hyperallergic (here)

Kurt Tong, In Case It Rains In Heaven
Through March 4th

Jen Bekman Gallery
6 Spring Street
New York, NY 10012