What We Do Is Secret: Read Our Intimate Interview Of Controversial and Provocative Chinese Photographer Ren Hang →

Ren Hang’s photographs rake a dagger across the main artery of sociosexual norms and leave a glittering crime scene of bodies splayed across the frame in ecstatic and erotic forms. As a Chinese artist, this makes his work even more incendiary and provocative – even in the face of his home country’s strict censorship laws. We got a chance to interview Hang (pronounced ‘hung’) back in 2011, when his work was just gaining international recognition. Over the years, he has had solo exhibitions in almost every major city. With his current show on view now at MAMA gallery, he can put Los Angeles on that list. In a back office at the gallery, before the opening of his show, we were able to conduct a second interview and ask the controversial Beijing-based artist about his work, his explosive career and his place in the current photographic and artistic zeitgeist. Hang is notoriously media shy, because he wants the work to speak for itself. Work that is unplanned, unchoreographed and not scripted in any way. Click here to read more. 

Cameron Platter "U-SAVED-ME" @ Depart Foundation In Los Angeles

U-SAVED-ME is Cameron Platter’s first solo exhibition in the United States, featuring work made over a two-year period. Comprising video, sound, sculpture, tapestry, and drawings, the works in the exhibition cohere to form an immersive installation that captures the artist’s eclectic and multi-disciplinary approach to research and art making. Blurring the distinction between high and low, Platter’s work appropriates, references, and filters, in a highly personal and idiosyncratic way, the enormous amounts of information available to us today. U-SAVED-ME draws on sources as disparate as R. Kelly, fast food, Constantin Brâncuși, historical South African artists and Arts and Crafts movements, LSD, landscape, Deepak Chopra, poetry, interracial pornography, cheese curls, advertising, therapy, psycho-collage, and consumerism. Cameron Platter "U-SAVED-ME" will be on view until September 24, 2016 at Depart Foundation, 9105 West Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles

Artist John Baldessari With The Prototype of His BMW "Art Car" #19 To Be Unveiled Next Fall

John Baldessari is currently working on his rendition of the BMW "art car" with a prototype of the M6 GT3 model. Baldessari’s Art Car wilk be a ‘rolling advert’ for himself, featuring aspects from some of his most famous works – his use of colored dots. “For me, the car is certainly an icon of contemporary life. I have done sculpture before, but it’s the first time I have ever in a sense collaborated. I didn’t design the car – I collaborated with the designers of the car. I think the challenge comes in making something that cannot be understood from just one point of view, but only from a total point of view. I figured my use of colored dots is kind of an iconic series, so I had to include that. I’m actually advertising myself.” The final product will be unveiled on November 30, 2016 during Art Basel Miami and on the Daytona racetrack in January 2017. photograph by BMW

Jay Miriam "Catch The Heavenly Bodies" @ Half Gallery In New York

Jay Miriam's first solo show in New York, Catch the Heavenly Bodies, brings the viewer into a land of painting limbo. At first each figure shares its secret past only with Miriam, eventually breaching the imaginative and entering into the physical world. A Rorschach inquisition begins to take shape while lines stretch and recompose. Limbs grow from arms to legs; faces turn from holy to siren. Jay Miriam "Catch The Heavenly Bodies" will be on view until July 27, 2016 at Half Gallery in New York. photographs by Adam Lehrer

"A Modest Proposal" Group Show Opening @ Hauser and Wirth Gallery In New York

In 1729, Jonathan Swift wrote an essay offering short-term solutions to Ireland’s dire situation with poverty and starvation. The essay, entitled A Modest Proposal, was simple in its intent: to stave off hunger, the Irish must simply start eating their children. It is that essay and its sentiment satirizing the absurd dilemma of being slaves to our bodies that provided the jumping off point for Hauser & Wirth’s new show, also entitled A Modest Proposal. The show features works from New York-based fine art photographer Lucas Blalock, Los Angeles-based Japanese sculptor and painter Naotaka Hiro, New York-based Russian mixed-media artist and painter Sanya Kantarovsky, New York-based French conceptual, performance, and mixed-media artist Nicola L., Iranian-American Los Angeles-based painter Tala Madani, and Polish painter Jakub Julian Ziólkowski. All the works in the show critique our relationships to our “bodies and the abject,” often with a light (albeit conceptual) touch and a sense of humor. Hauser & Wirth’s curatorial efforts are always spectacular, and seeing these artists interact with another in a gallery space should prove quite a treat. To open the show, Hauser & Wirth staffers put on red plastic onesies that were all connected, connecting the human bodies to one another as they flailed and gasped for freedom. "A Modest Proposal" will be on view until July 29, 2016 at Hauser Wirth, 18th Street, New York.  text and photographs by Adam Lehrer

What She Said: Read Our Exclusive Interview With Deanna Templeton On The Occasion Of Her New Book And Solo Photography Show →

Most may know Deanna Templeton as the wife, muse and woman behind skater, photographer extraordinaire, Ed Templeton. Just the same, though, you could say that Ed is the man and muse behind Deanna. But the truth is that they walk hand in hand – sometimes literally – especially when they go on their daily stroll through Huntington Beach photographing the seaside community’s sun drenched denizens. Indeed, Deanna and Ed are truly one of the greatest artistic duos in recent memory. While their work isn’t purely collaborative, both of their identities as artists and photographers are wholly unique, dynamic and alive with a searing, youthful vibrancy. Click here to read more. 

That's A Damn Fine Painting: An Interview With Adam Parker Smith On His Fantastical Solo Show On View Now In New York →

Painting. Multi-media. Installation. Sculpture. All of these tags have been applied to the practice of New York-based artist Adam Parker Smith. All of these tags are or have been correct in their labeling of Smith’s work. But as wild and conceptual as Smith’s work gets at times, he roots his art in the fundamentals of painting. Whether he’s making mylar balloon sculptures or putting together an exhibition of works stolen from other artists (as he did with his Lu Magnus Gallery exhibition Thanks), he’s doing so with acknowledgement of the fundamentals of painting: “I think my work can be jarring but a lot of times it is smooth and cumulative,” he says while laboring over the installation of his current solo show at The Hole in NYC, entitled Oblivious the Greek. “The work moves well, it’s balanced, and its colors compliment it. One of the elements that make a work successful is being attractive.” Click here to read. 

Pop Music Is Not A Dirty Word: Read Our Exclusive Interview With Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor On His Beautiful New Solo Album →

For the past 16 years, the quintessential British electronic group Hot Chip has been releasing album after delicious album, with a bevy of catchy tracks that are pop magic at its majestic finest. At the core of Hot Chip is a singular voice that is longing, soulful and demonically angelic. That singular voice belongs to Alexis Taylor, who this month released a new solo album, simply titled Piano, that is perhaps best described as antithetical to the grand pop balladry of Hot Chip, or even his own past solo records, but still maintains that signature wistful expressiveness. If Hot Chip is music to get high to, and to dance the night away to, Taylor’s newest album is music for reflection, introspection and soul-searching. Click here to read more. 

Ren Hang "What We Do Is Secret" @ MAMA Gallery In Los Angeles

Perhaps inadvertently, Ren Hang’s subject matter and seemingly simple technique have transcendent ramifications. His subjects project an irreverence that directly disrupts the restrictive realm of heteronormativity and presents alternate sexual and aesthetic realities. The title of Hang’s exhibition, What We Do Is Secret, references the music of punk band the Germs, which aligns with the provocative spirit of the artist’s images. Antagonism abounds in Hang’s work with a counterculture-fueled rebellion lying at its core. Ren Hang "What We Do Is Secret"  will be on view at MAMA Gallery until July 23, 2016.