There’s an ambitious exhibit of Asian American art at the Asia Society in New York, called “One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now.” The New York Times has a detailed review. Among the 21 artists whose works are being exhibited, at least two are desi, Saira Wasim and Chitra Ganesh.

Saira Wasim, who is from Lahore, trained in painting classical Mughal miniatures before moving to the U.S. recently. She was part of the “Karkhana” group that had its own show in New York not too long ago (see Manish’s post from last year). She does these great collage-like miniatures that often parody either political figures or scenes of cross-cultural misunderstanding.

Among the images of Wasim’s I’ve come across on the internet, my favorite so far is “Buzkashi” (Goat-grabbing), pictured above (click on the image to see the full picture). Here is how Wasim characterizes the painting on her website:

So this painting depicts ‘One Man’s show’ of Military Dictator of Pakistan, Perverz Musharaff sitting on a presidency throne and his imperialism is shown with four arms like Hindu god Shiv.

The basic constitutional structure of the country evolving around his regime; army generals are celebrating ‘martial law’ by dancing and wearing Hawaiian sandals.

The worldÂ’s seventh nuclear state in spite of her national debt over forty billion dollars and spending on defense budget over 3.5 billion dollars a year. Here goat is symbolized as innocent public. (link)

Wow. I’m surprised there hasn’t been an outcry about her work yet (maybe there has been one, and I missed it). Continue reading →

The Indian born artist Anish Kapoor has a major sculpture going up at Rockefeller Center in New York next month, and there’s a detailed profile of him in the New York Times (thanks, Tamasha).

The sculpture is called “Sky Mirror,” and it’s essentially a large, convex piece of highly polished stainless steel, roughly in the shape of a contact lens. From the image at the Times (which is computer generated) as well as images of the same sculpture at other sites, I have a feeling this piece is going to be a bit of a tourist sensation.

This high-profile placing of one of Kapoor’s sculptures is a coup for the artist, but hardly the first time he’s been given pride of place in the western art world. Major pieces of his are on display in the MOMA and the Tate Modern in London, the most famous of which might be Marsyas, a massive construction that filled the Tate’s vast Turbine Hall four years ago. Kapoor is one of the most important and influential practitioners of a movement in abstract sculpture called either minimalism or post-minimalism, depending on how exact we’re being.

It’s a long way to come for a Doon School boy. Continue reading →

A solo exhibit by Indian Painter Anjolie Ela Menon is up at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Artdaily reports. Menon is a Delhi-based painter of mixed American and Indian heritage. She was born in 1940 and studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris as well as at the J.J. School of Art in Bombay (which she did not like!). Menon has had an active and successful career, winning many awards, including India’s prestigious Padma Shri.

In the exhibit are ten major paintings as well as a large a triptych called “Yatra,” which you can see in small form here. See if you can rectify the painting itself with the explanation offered in Artdaily:

This triptych depicts various figures that can be identified as participants in a particularly well-known north Indian Hindu pilgrimage, or yatra. MenonÂ’s interest in these pilgrims stems from both a sense of admiration and from her view of their devotional act as an unbroken bridge linking IndiaÂ’s ancient past with its rapidly modernizing present. (link)

(Incidentally, the image on the right is a portrait of Menon I found on the Flickr site of a brilliant photographer calling herself “50mm.” Check out the rest of 50mm’s amazing photos here.) Continue reading →

Thanks to an anonymous tipster, I read this article in the Independent about a strange happening at the Musée Guimet in Paris involving a statue of one of Shiva’s wives (whose name is unspecified). The headless statue, which had been recovered from the Bakong temple in Cambodia in 1935, was reunited with its head after nearly six hundred years.

The temple was built in 881, during the Khmer dynasty, and is one of many ancient Hindu temples scattered around Southeast Asia (today, the vast majority of Cambodians are Buddhists). The statue was decapitated in 1431, though exactly why or who did it I do not know. The body of the statue came to Paris in 1935, and the head remained in the museum affixed to the nearby Angkor Wat, Cambodia’s most famous tourist attraction.

The reunification of head and body happened completely by accident. John Gunther Dean, an ambassador to Cambodia in the 1970s, known for protecting Cambodian art from the Khmer Rouge, decided to give the museum a present from his personal collection: Continue reading →

Ever since Steven Colbert invented the word “Truthiness” I have been desperately searching for a word of my own to invent so that I too can become a pop culture reference and get a shot out on VH-1’s Best Week Ever. I would humbly like to submit to you all the word “Plogging” (which is the verb form of the word “Plog”). It means blogging your paintings or other works of art. We already have the word “Flog” for Foto-weblog, a place where one can display their photography. Instead of Paint-Blog (the origin of “Plog”) I thought of Art-Blog (Alog) but the second one reminded me of something dirty. In any case here are two examples of fine Plogs. The first one belongs to my friend Adnan Hussain. The guy is crazy prolific and seems to be putting up new stuff almost every day, whereas most bloggers struggle to write just one post every day. Hopefully he will forgive me for snagging two (1,2) of his works as examples (click on thumbnails for larger pictures):

Be sure to leave him comments if you like his stuff, it’s pretty addictive.

The second example of a Plog that I will share with you is the one that belongs to Gautam Rao.

I’m an artist living in Indianapolis, Indiana. In this blog, I’ll be posting new paintings regularly. My goal is to challenge myself, and to seek the extraordinary in everyday life.

All paintings are oil on masonite. [Link]

Here is an example of one of his works. My own interpretation of it is that many of us are beginning to see ourselves as viewed through the window of a computer. Nah, I’m just kidding…just trying to sound smart.

If you guys know of any other South Asian “plogs” then please leave them in the comments. Also, keep your fingers crossed that I get on to Best Week Ever.

Continue reading →

A note on the tipline from desi academic extraordinaire Amitava Kumar reminds us of Disappeared in America, an ongoing multimedia project that began by documenting the round-up of immigrants in the post-9/11 hysteria and has now expanded into a web of collaborations among America- and Europe-based artists. Together they are tackling the rise of suspicion and xenophobia in all these countries, the climate of secrecy and fear, the intended and unintended consequences of actions by governments and their foes. (Manish mentioned the project last February here.)

… While our work started in the American context, we have expanded to look at Europe & the Middle East, in recognition that anti-migrant xenophobia, coupled with Islamophobia, is not a new or uniquely American phenomenon.

The collaborative has several new “interventions” in the next couple of months in New York, Houston and San Francisco that Mutineers in those cities might find interesting.

This is also an opportunity to point folks to tipster Amitava’s work. Now a professor at Vassar College, he’s one of those desi polymaths who covers politics, art, culture, discourse, sociology with even analytical poise and great literary verve. He’s also perhaps the most prominent and interesting discussant of matters Bihari on the web. Indeed, if there’s a thematic connection here, it’s that he is actively engaged in un-disappearing Bihar from the collective consciousness, a Sisyphean task that he handles with aplomb.

Recent posts on Amitava’s blog include one featuring photos from the arrival in Bihar of the avian flu; a mock letter from Lalu Yadav, Bihar’s “supremo” (as an Indian newspaper might say) to George Bush; and a joyful announcement of the upcoming U.S. edition of Upamanyu Chatterjee’s comic classic English, August, 18 years after its original publication. Continue reading →

This painting comes to us via SM tipster Omar Khan:

“An Execution in British India”- Painting by Vassili Verestchagin

As part of his article accompanying the wood engraving of the painting when it was published in Harper’s Weekly on November 17, 1888, [Harper’s Weekly art critic Clarence Cook] wrote:

“So with the other picture, the shooting of the Sepoys, Verestchagin does not say that this particular scene is an incident of the great mutiny. Shooting from guns is the only way, he says, that 60,000 soldiers in a strong country can keep in awe 250,000,000 natives. Superstition must be utilized. The natives do not fear to die, but they fear to die in any way that destroys the identity of the body. They cannot enter heaven blown limb from limb. Therefore this is the way to touch their souls with dreadful awe, and the English, says our artist, have always blown from guns, blow from guns today, and will blow from guns as long as India is held. [Link]

In the painting you presumably see Sepoy soliders in Delhi, captured during the 1857 Mutiny, fixed to the front ends of cannons, and about to be obliterated (although check the comments for a more likely explanation of what is being depicted here). I’m not sure that it is clear if this scene was actually witnessed by Verestchagin, but I like the description of the painting.

Verestchagin’s notoriety came from showing some of the most talked about events of the era. This scene was a standard British way to settle scores, and continued long after the war of independence in 1857. It was hotly debated in British and Indian papers between liberals and conservatives. To the former it was an excess of colonialism, to the latter an essential ingredient. As a Russian, Verestshagin was on opposite sides of the British as far as India was concerned. His American audience was also more critical of colonialism. [Link]