Richard S. Chang | ChinaShop

Art Mike Ming and The Barnstormers Collective

October 3, 2011 - 12:15 pm

Among the work on display in Mike Ming’s aptly titled solo exhibition, “All Over the Road” — at Nepenthes, a high-end clothing boutique in Manhattan — are three mammoth-sized paintings with abstract brushwork, a few smaller paintings with tousled and intricate lines, a couple of surfboards, a carved-out skateboard and two motorcycle helmets with enamel pin stripes.

“I don’t have that signature, ‘Oh, that’s a Mike Ming work,’” the artist said at his Brooklyn studio one recent afternoon. “I think it just runs the whole gamut. The stuff I’m showing is all over the place.”

The same could be said for his influences, which seem to flow effortlessly from his many pursuits, including surfing, skating and motorcycles. For one painting in progress, it’s been dolphins. Ming saw a few off the coast of Queens (or the closest thing Queens has to a coast).

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Art JR’s Inside Out Project in the South Bronx

by Richard S. Chang

September 15, 2011 - 8:48 am

Before it shut down last March, Bridges Juvenile Center in the Bronx was described by some, generously, as Dickensian. With dark cells, abusive guards and deficient rehab programs, the juvenile center had a reputation for turning its residents into hardened criminals.

But today, the white-brick building conjures a cheerier mood. Thanks to a local community group and the Inside Out project, created by the French artist JR in March, the center’s outer wall is covered with black-and-white portraits of those who live in the neighborhood.

“After we did that, we received emails from organizations thanking us,” said Paul Ramirez, co-founder of Mainland Media, an organization dedicated to enhancing the overall image of the Bronx.

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Art Artist Dalek: Pushing Boundaries

by Richard S. Chang

June 27, 2011 - 10:29 am

For his new exhibition at the University of Alabama, the artist Dalek (born James Marshall) works with only the color blue, manipulating various shades in a precise geometry to create dimension. The new work is a departure from what he is known for — painting with a bright and varied palette, most recently in abstract patterns that were simultaneously chaotic and ordered.

“That show was a definite departure, but it was fun to play with an entirely new direction,” he said of the exhibition in Alabama. “I think these sorts of things feel like a natural transition for me, or an expansion really. I don’t think it replaces anything, just sort of adds to the foundation.”

Soon, Dalek heads off to Oklahoma City to undertake another installation and, no doubt, reveal more surprises. Recently, I spoke with him to find out more about the new show and his no-fear attitude.

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Art You Gotta Break Some Eggs… The Art of Scott Campbell

by Richard S. Chang

June 10, 2011 - 8:34 am

Last October, Scott Campbell, the Brooklyn-based tattoo artist-turned-fine artist, arrived in Mexico for the opening of his solo show to find a vodka company’s logo plastered all over the gallery; he had agreed to only a small logo.

“Essentially, I had some issues,” he told Interview, “and when I confronted [the show’s organizer] with these issues in what I felt was a productive way, he came back with a personal attack.”

Campbell said he tried to rectify the situation, but when he realized they were at an impasse, he decided, “No one makes any money.” He lit a gasoline-fueled fire outside of the gallery and proceeded to throw all of his work — which sold out on opening night — into it.

It was a defining moment in his nascent career. But it came and went faster than the gallery in Mexico could extinguish the flames (and then sell the pieces for top dollar as “artist-intervened” works).

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Art All Hands On Decks: The Skateboard Art of Haroshi

by Richard S. Chang

May 6, 2011 - 10:53 am

A few years ago, Tokyo-based artist Haroshi, a passionate skater since his early teens, was faced with a common conundrum among his ilk: a growing collection of broken skate decks.

“Purchasing new decks is a never-ending cycle and this was evident by the tower of old decks that were reaching to the ceiling of my room,” he says on his website. “We can’t throw away these decks because they hold sentimental meanings to us. I looked at these unusable decks every day and thought there must be something I can make with these.”

Eight years ago, Haroshi started making sculptures out of the discarded decks — a skull, his limbs, a life-size moose head, a bear, Mario from Donkey Kong — with jaw-dropping results. Now some of his most spectacular works are on display in a solo exhibition at the Jonathan Levine Gallery in New York.

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Art Art of Los Angeles: Patrick Martinez

by Richard S. Chang

April 15, 2011 - 5:52 am

Artist Patrick Martinez plants his flag in the Los Angeles that tourists don’t see, unless they take the Boyle Ave. exit by accident. Pawnshops, street vendors and people trying to make a dollar outta 14 cents inhabit Martinez’s colorful paintings and neon mixed media pieces. The palm trees and hills that LA is known for are always far away in the distance.

But Martinez, a graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, isn’t just an observer. He is a champion of his surroundings, humanizing the people on the street and their struggles, and a voice for their causes. He has employed foam hands, similar to those found in sports arenas but shaped as handguns, to distill the effects of a down economy and created hats for a fictitious Arizona Wetbacks baseball team to castigate the rhetoric of Arizona immigration laws.

Martinez recently opened an exhibition, “Hustlemania,” at Known Gallery in LA. It is an ambitious show. Its centerpiece is a beautifully executed sculpture made of bronze and colored resin. The subject is a thug holding two handguns, shooting streams of water that arc harmlessly into a pool at his feet. The softening of a hard archetype is a common theme in Martinez’s work, which the artist reveals in this interview to be as personal as it is political.

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Art/Design Touching the Brushstrokes with Google Art Project

by Richard S. Chang

February 9, 2011 - 10:52 am

Google unleashed its ambitious Art Project this week – a visual library of more than 1,000 images of art from 17 major museums from around the world. The paintings, sculptures and installations are rendered in such detail – around 7 billion pixels each – that you can zoom up to the brushstrokes of the individual strands of hair on Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

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Art/Design Kenny Scharf vs. Graffiti

by Richard S. Chang

February 2, 2011 - 10:16 am

When Kenny Scharf was painting his mural—an orgy of candy-colored cartoon faces in various states of distortion—on the northwest corner of Houston and Bowery in downtown Manhattan, he said he wasn’t worried about graffiti writers painting over his piece, as they did to Shepard Fairey’s “May Day” mural at the same spot in July.

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Art/Design Featured Graffiti Artist MadC Bombs a 350-Foot-Long Wall

by Richard S. Chang

January 20, 2011 - 10:46 am

If you travel by rail between Berlin and Halle, Germany, and pay attention to the passing landscape, you will eventually set eyes on a 350-foot-long graffiti mural (obligatory football field metric: two and a third). It’s a series of detailed scenes: a laboratory overrun by rats, a shipping port under dark clouds, galleons fighting through rough waters and a giant octopus, and a cityscape at sunset. The graffiti name of the artist, MadC, is ubiquitous.

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Art/Design Guerrilla Artist Crochets Over New York City Landmark

by Richard S. Chang

January 5, 2011 - 9:21 am

Just before Christmas in 1989, Arturo di Modica, a Sicilian artist living in New York City, recruited a few friends, loaded his sculpture, “Charging Bull,” a 7,000-pound, 16-foot-long bronze bull, onto a flatbed truck. They transported it from his studio to Wall Street and deposited it, without permission, in front of the New York Stock Exchange. The sculpture was swiftly removed by the city the next day, but due to public outcry it was reinstalled at a location nearby, where it has since become a neighborhood landmark (and judging by its prominence on Flickr, a popular tourist attraction).

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