~ Karen McRae, Winter Wrapped Trees (via Helen McClory)
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So I decided to look for some place to eat something — anything — and that wasn’t easy. To the north was Tiananmen Square, to the east was the Chairman Mao’s Memorial Hall, and to the west was the Great Hall of the People, where the ceremony would be held. So my only choice was south. I went south. I passed several soldiers, with their eyes steadily fixed on the same spots just like some wax statues. Then I passed an old, high, western-style building, whose windows were broken, like a gothic haunted house. Then a beautiful public convenience, like a temple. Nothing to eat. I decided to go on. I crossed by the subway. In the subway I was quite taken aback by what I saw. Three monstrous beggars — maybe demented, maybe deformed, maybe just dirty, I couldn’t be sure — lying on the ground, covered with rubbishy quilts (obviously, they slept there in the night). I had no choice but to pass them, quickly, I must say. And at last, when I returned to the surface of the earth, I saw the KFC across the street. I had a great breakfast at KFC. These were just like a series of symbols, I told myself.
~ Kong Yalei @ Granta
~ Zander Olsen, Cadair, Oak 2010
‘This is an ongoing series of constructed photographs rooted in the forest. These works, carried out in Surrey, Hampshire and Wales,involve site specific interventions in the landscape, ‘wrapping’ trees with white material to construct a visual relationship between tree, not-tree and the line of horizon according to the camera’s viewpoint.’ (via)
A fascinating inverse of Myoung Ho Lee
~ Aaron Hobson’s C i n e m a s c a p e s, Street View Edition:
enchanted and remote lands typically only reserved for the eyes of it’s inhabitants, but now are captured on camera by the automated and aesthetically-neutered street view cars that linger.
Some images have a post-apocalyptic vibe to them, but it’s all open to interpretation. I like to evoke the future as uncertain — one that we dream will bring eternal bliss, yet fear will end in annihilation.
~ Simen Johan @ The Morning News
The Vardø project is an anomalous part of the Norwegian public roads administration’s admirable National Tourist Routes program, through which architecturally distinctive and environmentally sensitive structures are being erected to encourage visits to outposts of exceptional natural beauty, from spectacular snow-covered mountain ranges to vast tundra traversed by herds of reindeer. Dispersed in groups of two to five stops along eighteen separate stretches of highway on or near Norway’s 15,000-mile-long fjord-infiltrated coastline, nearly seventy such destinations have thus far been completed. This is by far the most exemplary public works initiative undertaken by any nation in recent memory.
These interventions range from scenic viewing platforms and bicycle storage shelters to rest stations and hiking paths. The vast majority of them are by young, largely unknown, but clearly talented Norwegians. In this case, however, the sponsors sought foreign artists of established reputation, who could meet the difficult challenge of conjuring a monument to strange, long-ago events that left no visible remains.
@ The New York Review of Books
Peter Zumthor is one of my favorite architects; his Brother Klaus Field Chapel was a touchstone while writing my novel. I hope I get a chance to see his work in person someday.
