Art in Environmental Reactions
by Luchia Miehua Lee
☆Mark on your calendar-
Raising the Temperature Exhibition will be open at the Queens Museum, New York City on Sunday February 2nd, 2014.
I would like to share the environmental concept with you, and to let you listen to the visual statement from the 10 artists in this exhibition.
“It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-twentieth century…” [1]
In art as in life, no one is external to the social and cultural framework in which we live. Each of us has assisted in creating the environment degeneration, but in here we have no ambition to participate in the propaganda of climate change. Instead, we want to create abstract or exquisite reflections that engage environmental issues. Contemporary artists assert the priority of insights and evoke the societal issues which engender the problems discussed by scientists. Raising the Temperature is a joint effort to express through the voices of contemporary art the urgency of this problem. Raising the Temperature exhibit will not celebrate direct realistic representation of disappearing forests, shrinking glaciers, or other threats to our environment. This is about contemporary artistic response to observed anthropogenic challenges to the environment.
The works in this exhibit are individual but at the same time illustrate the theme of the exhibit. We are not exhibiting an activist response to global warming, but a reactionary one. Scientific alarms have been filtered through artistic sensibilities to reflect social and aesthetic sensibilities. The works in this exhibition comment on our changing relationship to the world we inhabit, or discuss the conditions of our urban life and its toll on the planet.
Artists :( in alphabetical order)
Miya ANDO (Phosphorescent installation)
Kay LIN (Hanging balloon, bridge painting and installation)
Pey Chwen LIN (Animation/ video)
Todd Gavin (Carbon mixed-media wall piece)
Jeremiah TEIPEN (Mixed -media/ digital video work)
Chi Tsung WU (Sound and mixed-media installation)
Sarah WALKO (Installation using recycling organic and materials)
XI Fei (Manhattan & Black Hole series paintings & installations)
Marlene Tseng YU (Forest Fire paintings)
Hai ZHANG (photography and books)
(Art work images and more information will be released soon)
[1] Climate Change 2013: the Physical Science Basis written and
published by IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change )
