Cai Guo-Qiang's studios in New York's East Village surround a garden filled with Japanese maples, jasmine, and an old cast-iron bathtub turned gurgling fountain. A pretty tranquil retreat for a man best known for "explosion events" like the circle of fireworks he detonated high over Central Park's reservoir in 2003 or his drawings with gunpowder—both supervised by the famous Grucci fireworks family.
(Watch a video of Cai creating a gunpowder drawing.)
Since he won the Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice Biennal, Cai has done his best to bring Chinese art to a Western audience. Now he's bringing it back East: His collaboration with Taiwan's Cloud Gate Dance Theater premieres in Taipei this month, and he's already hunkered down to prepare his biggest project yet, in Beijing. His opening and closing ceremonies for the 2008 Olympics, in the country where black powder was invented, should make the Fourth of July look like a handful of Safe and Sane sparklers.
Teresita Fernández
Winning a MacArthur "genius" grant last year hasn't changed what Teresita
Fernández makes in her Brooklyn studio—installations that use plexiglass
cubes, aluminum, or silk yarn. But it has given her the luxury of time. "I
don't have ten deadlines all at once," as she admits she had in the past.
Fernández's largest project to date—a 200-foot glass and steel bridge, embedded with digital images of clouds,
for Seattle's new Olympic Sculpture Park—should be crossable by January,
having been delayed by a long cement workers' strike. She might have known
better. "I'd pretty much shied away from working outdoors," Fernández says. "It's more bureaucratic and you have to do things to code." With two small
children, a project for the Louis Vuitton store in San Francisco, and
a show at her New York gallery, Lehmann Maupin, next spring, Fernández
hasn't opted for a life of leisure.
(See a slideshow of Fernández's work.)
Stan Douglas
"Stan Douglas is brilliant," says Thelma Golden, director of the Studio Museum
in Harlem. "He has an uncanny ability to capture the space
of a place in his films." Golden's museum recently showed Inconsolable
Memories, his rejigger of the 1968 Cuban Revolution film Memorias de
Subdesarrollo, moving the action
to 1980 and the Mariel Boat Lift. "I spent two months in Cuba, where I could
pass as Cuban with my mouth shut," Douglas says during a quick trip to New
York from
his home in Vancouver. "But people noticed what I was doing," and he was
forced to finish the film in Canada. His next film, Klatsassin, a
Rashomon-like probe of a bloody Indian attack during British Columbia's gold
rush, will be at the David Zwirner gallery in January. "It's
a Western. And Westerns are about stories, stories, stories," explains
Douglas. "And unreliable narration."
(Watch a clip from Douglas's Inconsolable Memories and another from Klatsassin.)
Vik Muniz
Brazilian-born Vik Muniz made his name with his "photographic delusions"
replicating, for instance, Frankenstein in caviar, Jackson Pollock in
chocolate, and Courbet's still shocking The Origin of the World in dirt. He
has just completed two new series, Pictures of Pigment (photos
of his versions, in pure pigment, of paintings by moderns like Klimt and
Hopper) and Pictures of Junk (Old Master works remade with bottles, bikes,
and other detritus from a Rio de Janeiro junkyard). In Rio, Muniz has a
studio in a warehouse that is 80 feet tall. "I was at the top of a crane
with the camera in a cage," he says at his main home and studio in Brooklyn.
"I used a laser pointer to tell the kids where to put the stuff." The
artist's retrospective lands at the Seattle Art Museum in November, and that
same month the Aperture Foundation will be handing him a lifetime
achievement award. "I'm getting really old, I guess," Muniz says. In fact,
he is only 44 and has his eight-month-old daughter and his wife, Janaina Tschäpe, also an artist, to keep him company on his travels.
(Watch a video of Muniz and his assistants creating a "junk" rendition of Caravaggio's Narcissus, and see a slideshow of work from the artist's "Pictures of Pigment" series.)
SIX TO WATCH
Anne Collier: A sardonic photographer of piles of record covers; appeared in this year's Whitney Biennial. See Collier's record-cover photos.
Jonah Freeman: Director of The Franklin Abraham, an art film about an out-of-control apartment building. Watch a clip from The Franklin Abraham.
Meghan Gerety: Creates obsessive drawings of trees with graphite (married to Michael Phelan, below). See Gerety's trees.
Justin Lowe: A recent solo show recreated a sleazy bodega and involved an actual ice cream truck. See a gallery of Lowe's artwork and listen to the soundtrack he created to accompany his bodega installation. (You might want to minimize the window once the MP3/audio begins to play.)
Michael Phelan: Will be in the Saatchi gallery's "Triumph of Painting" show this spring; appeared in Freeman's The Franklin Abraham. See some of Phelan's work.
Gibb Slife: Also appeared in The Franklin Abraham; The New York Times singled out his work as a high point of the summer 2006 group shows. See photos from one of Slife's installations.
