Ben Sakoguchi's Chinatown @ Bel Ami In Los Angeles

Ben Sakoguchi’s combinations of commercial signage, history painting, and Pop Art comment on the American Dream and its fraught entanglement with xenophobia and racism. With acrylic paint on canvas, Sakoguchi reassembles imagery from film posters, newspapers, comics, and internet searches to reveal subtexts of local discrimination, mass media exploitation, and state-sanctioned violence. A Japanese American who spent years of his childhood living in an internment camp during World War II, Sakoguchi comments on a century and a half of prejudice against diasporic Asians. Contending with overlapping histories that contribute to ideas of Asian American identity, Sakoguchi creates an ironic primer on capitalism’s treachery with an audacity that challenges and uplifts.

A publication with essays by Eli Diner (Critic, Curator, and Executive Editor of Cultured magazine), Steven Wong (Curator and the Director of the Vincent Price Art Museum, Monterey Park, CA), and Ana Iwataki (Writer, Curator, and PhD student in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture, University of Southern California, Los Angeles) will be released in PDF and printed form during the course of this exhibition.

Chinatown is on view through April 24 @ Bel Ami 709 N Hill St. #105, Los Angeles

Ben Sakoguchi Chinatown, 2014 Acrylic on canvas, wooden frames (1 of 15 panels) 53 x 91 in (134.6 x 231.1 cm)

Ben Sakoguchi
Chinatown, 2014
Acrylic on canvas, wooden frames (1 of 15 panels) 53 x 91 in (134.6 x 231.1 cm)

Adrian Piper's 'Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016' Opens @ Hammer Museum in Los Angeles

Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016 is the most comprehensive West Coast exhibition to date of the work of Adrian Piper (b. 1948, New York). It is also the first West Coast museum presentation of Piper’s works in more than a decade, and her first since receiving the Golden Lion Award for Best Artist at the 56th Venice Biennale of 2015 and Germany’s Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2018. Organized by The Museum of Modern Art, this expansive retrospective features more than 270 works gathered from public and private collections from around the world, and encompasses a wide range of mediums that Piper has explored for over 50 years: drawing, photography, works on paper, video, multimedia installations, performance, painting, sculpture, and sound. 

Piper’s groundbreaking, transformative work has profoundly shaped the form and content of Conceptual art since the 1960s, exerting an incalculable influence on artists working today. Her investigations into the political, social, and spiritual potential of Conceptual art frequently address gender, race, and xenophobia through incisive humor and wit, and draw on her long-standing involvement with philosophy and yoga.

For this exhibition, the Hammer is partnering with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) to present Piper’s work What It’s Like, What It Is #3, a large-scale mixed-media installation addressing racial stereotypes. Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016 in on view through January 6 at Hammer Museum 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles. photographs by Summer Bowie