HONOURED TO BE PART OF SCOPE Miami Beach featuring 140 International Exhibitors from 25 countries and 60 cities, and welcomes 60,000 visitors over the course of 6 days. Amidst an unprecedented outpouring of critical acclaim from press, curators and collectors, and a digital and social media outreach campaign garnering over 450 million impressions, SCOPE Miami Beach is once again poised to lead the charge for the emerging contemporary art market. scope-art.com See.me Art takes Miami

LOS ANGELES EXHIBITING KIM WAN/ PUBLICATIONS/ AVAILABLE THIS SUNDAY
Cultural Traffic Arts Fair
Sunday 18 November
Free Entry 11am – 8pm
That That Gallery
4405 W Jefferson Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90016

Cultural Traffic teams up with That That Gallery for this years Los Angeles fair. That That Gallery is a burgeoning creative space and intellectual pavilion established by artist Samantha McCurdy. Located in LA’s arts community West Adams neighbourhood, the gallery hosts a program of art, music, performance. A safespace LGBTQ friendly.

#iconography #halloffame #rollingstone #formalapproach #lessgestural #observational #internationalartist #contemporaryart #museum #study #extrapolation #figurative #markmaking #arthistory #arttheory #globalartworks #artworks #newdirection #diatribe #dichotomy #studio #culturaltraffic @culturaltraffic #miami #artbaselmiami #losangelesartscene

COME AND SAY HELLO TOMORROW! !
Cultural Traffic Arts Fair
Sunday 7th October
Old Spitalfields Market
Central Mezzanine Terrace
8 Horner Square, London E1 6EW
Kim Wan’s artworks will be available alongside rare and collectible print-publications art fair-FREE ENTRY, see you there! DJ’s, food and drink, performance….10am-5pm #spitalfields #shoreditch #contemporaryart #publications #museum #collectibles #rarebooks #zine #londonartscene #frieze #friezeweek2018 #oilpainting #internationalartist #contemporaryart #graffiti #graphic #arthistory #arttheory #globalartworks #artworks

To appropriate the words of Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message”. In the case of Kim Wan, rudimentary equates immediacy; this is an artist who paints first and asks questions later!

Kim Wan’s work is wonderfully rudimentary. It is rudimentary, in the sense that it is about the fundamental blocks that constitute a medium – oil paint – and it is about combining that with an idea of what is ‘inside himself’. Basic stuff. Paint and the surface which it is applied to, which in turn form the warp and weft of the ”World according to Wan’. Wan’s World becomes the world within his skins, and his skins can cover everything.

Wan enjoys paint! Great volumic clods of smeary paint – gathered together and layered – twirled, slathered hastily, and yet always controlled and unadulterated. Paint is skin – it sits on the surface and (usually) alludes to form – but in Wan’s case his painterly skin holds a beating heart; it is his personal message to the world.

Kim Wan’s skill lies in the combination of the physical skin of paint, and its application, to form interesting and unexpected relationships. His paint describes form, and its sheer volume becomes form; it becomes an object of “an object”. Slathering, stratified clods that form landscapes of paint, that make skin surfaces. Wan’s topography of paint skin and its inferred meaning encapsulate everything in the pliable congregation of an ever-shifting, evolving and borderless environment. It contains something limitless; it’s the skin of something infinite. The ground onto which his environments adhere could just as easily be a canvas as a concrete floor or an old sideboard. He’s a painter who goes over the edge between art object and everything else. He is an artist with skin in the game.

This makes his environments vulnerable and violent, on edge and paradoxical; everything becomes an autobiographical façade; awkward and brilliant, difficult. Wan’s work rests on this difficult knife-edge between contained self-love and actual, recognisable, unbound genius.

There is a danger, of course, that, in his exuberance, his work could fall on the side of self-indulgence; that he is implicitly saying that his art, that he himself, really is everything. However, this indulgence allows a chance of a catalyst – there appears to be a symbiotic relationship between the ‘indulgence’ and ‘genius’; both are needed, both are valid and combined, both aspects yield results!

The art critic and writer, Sasha Craddock remarked of Wan’s painting back in 1998, and I paraphrase:

“Kim paints with such energy that one may think the result could only be a mess, but in this case [points to very large painting of thick, loose gestural marks in ultramarine and pink].There is a fine line between utter indulgence and brilliance – Kim paints like a maestro – at least in this painting, maybe his other work is awkward indulgences?”

Squirting £250 of oil paint onto a canvas, all in one go, is an indulgence: a self-gratifying outlay of artistic spending power.

So I am going to suggest that awkward solipsism and brilliant outlay exist at the same time. I’m going to propose that Wan’s best work is his most awkward and indulgent work; that it is a brilliant form of compromised genius.

It is Kim Wan’s exclusive focus on the painterly that drives the violence, the verve and vigour of his paintings and at the same time echoes his vulnerability and vacillation within a certain tunnel vision. He is an artist caught between flesh and sinew, between pigment and medium; an artist who revolves around a helix of what it is to be everything inside a human skin but who then compromises that with his chosen medium; he ends up articulating being human in paint and so everything becomes boundlessly alive within his paintings’ thick skin.

By revolving around an indulgence of self – coupled with an articulation of that self-satisfaction within the outlay of an expensive new artificial skin, and by trying to go beyond the limits imposed by this colourful artistic paint surface, he has also found a way of going beyond his own skin.

And all of this, by simply slapping paint about!

By Alastair Eales
(Editorial essay support: Phil King)

http://alastair-eales.com/text.html

Self comes to mind – the self portrait in the digital age

Exhibition opening Friday 7th September 6.00pm – 9.00pm.
Electro Studios Project Space, Seaside Road, St Leonards on Sea TN38 0AL. United Kingdom

‘Self comes to mind is not about looking in the mirror, nor is it restricted to traditional fine
art practice. Implicit in the invitation to each of the participating 40 artists, is a sense of
intuition and trust that the tradition of self-portraiture, in whatever form, continues to
interest artists, even if it is not the main preoccupation of their practice.’

Gallery open to the public Saturday 8th and Sunday 9th, then Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th September 12.00am – 5.00pm
Exhibition closes Sunday 16th at 5.00pm

 

 

Preview to the public on August 27th (7.30pm – 9.30pm) 
Entrance: Free                                                                                                                                                                                             Complimentary drinks will be served                                                                                                                                                Municipal Art Gallery of Piraeus-Filonos Street 29, Piraeus, Greece, 18531

‘Nostalgia’ poster featuring ‘Self Portrait’ by Kim Wan

We invite you to attend the inauguration of the group exhibition of ‘Nostalgia’, at the Municipal Art Gallery of Piraeus. The exhibition will present works by Greek and international artists, from the field of painting, sculpture, photography and digital art. This will be the fourth and final part of the exhibition, which has travelled to Amsterdam, London and Timisoara in recent months.

Participating artists:
Min Angel
Karls Berzins
Rebecca Brandley
Emma Dolphin
Sina Ghahremani
Lou Gilmore
Christina Kolaiti
Jill Christine Miller
Maggy Milner
Sharleene Olivie
Ben Snowden
Iris Sun
Babs Thwaites
Chris Webb
Myfawny Williams

Artists represented by our gallery in London will also be exhibited, including the British artist, Kim Wan, and the American artist, Ronald Gonzalez.

The exhibition will open with a preview to the public on August 27th (7.30pm – 9.30pm) and will be open daily (4pm-8pm) until 2 September (2pm-6pm only on Sunday 2 September).

The entrance is free for everyone and we will offer drinks to the guests at the opening.
Municipal Art Gallery of Piraeus-Filonos Street 29, Piraeus, Greece, 18531

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Σας προσκαλούμε να παρευρεθείτε στα εγκαίνια της ομαδικής έκθεσης εικαστικών, ‘Nostalgia’, στη Δημοτική Πινακοθήκη Πειραιά.
Στην έκθεση θα παρουσιαστούν έργα απο Έλληνες και διεθνείς καλλιτέχνες, απο το χώρο της ζωγραφικής, της γλυπτικής, της φωτογραφίας και της ψηφιακής τέχνης.
Αυτο θα είναι το τέταρτο και τελευταίο μέρος της έκθεσης, η οποία ταξίδεψε τους προηγούμενους μήνες στο Άμστερνταμ, στο Λονδίνο και στη Τιμισοάρα.

Συμμετέχουν οι καλλιτέχνες:
Min Angel
Karls Berzins
Rebecca Brandley
Emma Dolphin
Sina Ghahremani
Lou Gilmore
Christina Kolaiti
Jill Christine Miller
Maggy Milner
Sharleene Olivie
Ben Snowden
Iris Sun
Babs Thwaites
Chris Webb
Myfawny Williams

καθώς και οι καλλιτέχνες που εκπροσωπούνται απο τη γκαλερί μας στο Λονδινο, ο Βρετανός, Kim Wan, και ο Αμερικανός, Ronald Gonzalez.
Η έκθεση θα ανοίξει για το κοινό στις 27 Αυγούστου (7.30μμ – 9.30μμ) και θα είναι ανοιχτή καθημερινά (4μμ-8μμ) μέχρι τις 2 Σεπτεμβρίου (2μμ-6μμ μόνο για τη Κυριακή 2 Σεπτεμβρίου).
Η είσοδος είναι ελεύθερη για όλους και θα προσφέρουμε ποτά στους καλεσμένους.

We need people to be photographed and filmed…We’re looking for you to express yourself in any way you see fit (think costumes, casual/formal wear, make up, etc…YOU WILL BE THE FOCUS, and YOU WILL BE THE ARTISTS..We’re asking you to film, photograph/ record each other and yourselves.We’ll provide activities, THE REST IS UP TO YOU! After the event is finished, youll have the opportunity to upload your images, films etc.onto a Facebook page for developing into further artworks e.g. drawings, films etc…
The event that will take place between 2-3pm on the 13th May at www.fiveyears.org
5 years gallery, Unit 2B1, Boothby Road, Archway N19 4AJ London. For more information, www.kimwanart.com
Please feel free to invite anyone else you know…
It’d be great to see you! Kim and Annie 😊

PRIVATE VIEW AMSTERDAM THIS FRIDAY
Group show ‘Nostalgia’ in Amsterdam
An ‘Art Number 23’ Exhibition
Private View: 11th May 18.00 – 21.00
Opening times: 12th – 14th May, 10.00am to 6.00pm
and 15th May, 10am-2.00pm

‘Games and Learning’ will be a one hour, participant-led workshop, consisting of learning to throw a rugby ball and/or a basketball or neither. It will be documented with a view to developing it further. The workshop will be run by the educator Annie Morris and the artist Kim Wan. It is open to all and the only requirement is to wear sports trainers. Participants will have the opportunity to document the workshop via their own mobile phones, cameras, microphones, recording devices, etc. and then upload it to social media. All participation is voluntary.

If you would like to participate,  please send an email to info@kimwanart.com with the header Five Years-Games and Learning.

Five years gallery -Unit 2B1 Boothby road, Archway,  London N19 4AJ