Art & Globalization

5 Questions

1. Is it still relevant to know the geographical background of an artist in our contemporary globalized culture?

2. What foreshadowing of artists from China and India play into the global art market?

3. Is the art world to big and diverse for its own good?

4. Can the artist become outsourced like in many other fields? How?

5. Is the new hybrid of art and culture a benefit or a distraction from making art? Do we have access to much information?

Huang Yong Ping, buddha's hands, 2006

Huang Yong Ping - french artist of chinese origin is exhibiting as part of arsenale at

Venice Art Biennale 09. ping's work has its roots in confrontation, contrast, exchange,

and the coexistence of different cultural and spiritual worlds. his oversize recreations

of the hand of buddha is made from a type of cedar tree traditionally used in chinese

medicine, that dwell in the ambiguity of references to both spiritual and earthly realms.

Fatimah Tuggar, People WAtching (+2 others; set of 3), 1997-2000

Phillips de Pury & Co.

Franz Ackermann African Diamond, 2006


Mixed media on paper on Aludibond on wood
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles


Franz Ackermann’s work explores issues of travel and tourism, contrasting subjective experience with broader issues of globalization, mobility, and commerce. He travels to select locations to render time and geographic space in wall-scale paintings and mixed-media constructions. African Diamond, like many of his works, eradicates the formal boundaries between sculpture, painting, and advertising by translating each medium’s visual vocabulary into his own distinct patois.

Michal Rovner, Chinese Calculator, 2004 
Steel vitrine with glass, stone and DVD video projection 


Installed near the entrance of the Biennale, Israeli born, New York-based artist Michal Rovner presents Chinese Calculator (2004)four stone tablets that celebrate faux archaeological findings by establishing a fictitious history. Each rough stone slab is touched with light from tiny projectors. Small patches of light noticeably waver on their hard surfaces, refusing permanence and legibility. The projections resemble ancient script, but they are actually human figures, alive and active.

Yinka Shonibare, The Swing (reproduction of Fragonard's 'the swing'), 2001

Yinka Shonibare is someone born in England but born to Nigerian parents. Eventually moves back to Nigeria, but was also educated in England; so is truly bi-cultural, and uses this experience to confront what it's like to grow up in with Nigerian traditions but to be educated in Western culture.