Contemporary Art, Painting

Livien Yin: Thirsty

Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, August 21, 2024–February 23, 2025

At Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center, Livien Yin’s exhibition “Livien Yin: Thirsty” (on view August 21, 2024–February 23, 2025) is an intimate, single-gallery show in the Ruth Levison Halperin Gallery and marked Yin’s first solo museum exhibition. The exhibition brought together new and recent paintings shaped by a research-driven practice: Yin stages luminous, fictional vignettes—often casting friends as models—to collapse past and present and draw connective threads between contemporary life and historical Asian American figures and environments. A central historical anchor is the story of Chinese “paper sons and daughters” during the Chinese Exclusion Act era; Yin draws from historic photographs while using the absences and gaps in the archival record as a productive space to imagine possible realities

I’m also drawn to her formal style which evokes for me a sort of paint-by-numbers vibe (I mean this in the best, most complementary way), where local color shifts are not smoothed together in their modelling but are stepped like layers.


https://livienyin.com/
https://museum.stanford.edu/exhibitions/livien-yin-thirsty
https://lahstalon.org/at-the-cantor-spirit-house-and-livien-yin-explore-asian-american-identity/

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Modern Art, Painting, Sculpture

Robert Indiana: The American Dream

Pace, New York, May 9 to August 15, 2025



Pace Gallery’s Robert Indiana: The American Dream pulls the artist’s signage, numerology, and road-worn Americana together into a single argument: Indiana didn’t just brand LOVE; he built a whole visual grammar for the country that taught him its alphabet on billboards and gasoline pumps. The show gathers early hard-edge paintings, later meditations on highways and coinage, and the sculptural ONE Through ZERO (The Ten Numbers).

If Indiana’s paintings read like dispatches from postwar America, the Cor-Ten numbers slow the message to a rust-blooming hum. Each numeral stands alone and can be re-sequenced to generate fresh alignments of time, memory, and fate. He often described the sequence as a life cycle: 1 as birth, 0 as death, with the intervening digits walking us through youth, prime, and autumn.

Indiana, a self-described “American painter of signs,” doesn’t illustrate the Dream so much as surface its infrastructure: the numerals we assign to ages and exits; the slogans that sell us gasoline and belonging; the hard edges of policy that decide who merges and who waits. Pace’s framing stresses that double register. Personal history braided with public language, make the show as much about how a country talks to itself as about one artist’s lexicon.

Pace includes canonical examples but the show’s real satisfaction is how the numbers re-center Indiana’s project. He builds a ledger for American aspiration, where desire reads as typography and consequence arrives as arithmetic. It is a quiet reminder that how we arrange our symbols is how we arrange our lives

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Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Ann Hamilton: As After Is Before

T Space, Rhinebeck, New York, July 16 to October 1 2023

I met Ann Hamilton in 1998 when she installed her piece “Myein” at the Venice Biennale (I was working to install the Philip Johnson exhibition at the Ca’ Zenobio). Was delighted to see her again here at her work exhibited at Steven Holl’s T Space room.

This piece is an installation of wool coats and sheep fleece, as aromatic as it was beautiful

Inscribed on a stone near the coats are her words:

as outside is to inside
as animal is to human
as stone is to words
as sound is to song
as image is to object
as made is to grown

-Hamilton
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