Latest news with #experimentalart
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Champions review – intimate encounter is a voyage round the father
This is a show about a gay man's fraught relationship with his father. Andreas Constantinou sits in an armchair, naked, silently listening. He has told us that, during the Covid pandemic, his father died and so did his mother five weeks later. He recorded conversations with them and these are played in sometimes repetitive ways, caught between the fuzz of radio tuning. You do not get a sense of Constaninou's mother but his father's voice is key. He speaks of his 'disappointment' over his son's sexuality, of wanting him to be a real man and of his dismay when Constantinou, as a child, started to play with dolls. The voices pour out of a TV set, radio and gramophone on stage: they serve as the equipment for this medium-like encounter, the words of the dead for ever living in the air and looping inside Constantinou's head. His recorded voice tells us anecdotally of other gay men he has asked about their difficult relationships with their fathers. It is a deeply personal and experimental show, evolving slowly and going nowhere particularly. Constantinou includes recorded exchanges with a therapist, and there does seem to be an intimate, therapeutic element to it. But there is beauty and artfulness too: the set is suffused in washes of colour. Giant screens feature a wrestling match between two men that leaves the the ring for ocean waves and meadows. They are arresting images, the bodies of the men filmed close up, the aggression in their fight slowly giving way to something more gentle, balletic and erotic. There are moments in the father's homophobia that leave you breathless for this son. The ending speaks of acceptance and feels too tidy, but it does make the point that there is a choice to reject or accept on both sides – for son as well as father, even posthumously. At Pentland theatre, Pleasance at EICC, Edinburgh, until 16 August All our Edinburgh festival reviews
South China Morning Post
31-07-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Hong Kong artists show experimental works at art museum on the China-North Korea border
This summer, Hong Kong artists Tsang Kin-wah and Mark Chung escaped their hometown's stifling heat by heading up to Dandong, the mainland Chinese frontier city best known for its border crossing with North Korea. Far-flung and with fewer than a million citizens, Dandong has become an unlikely magnet for contemporary artists and art lovers from all over the world. The reason is the Yalu River Art Museum, perched on a resort island just 500 metres (0.3 miles) from North Korean soil. The museum was founded in 2006 by businessman Ji Dahai, a Dandong native now based in Hong Kong. Over the years, the museum has built a solid reputation and is today considered one of the most cutting-edge contemporary art institutions in mainland China. Artists who have shown there include Beijing-based Song Dong, Robert Zhao from Singapore, and Swiss sculptor Katja Schenker. The two Hong Kong artists are the first from the city to exhibit at this singular institution, and they are creating some of their most experimental work there.
New York Times
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Diana Oh, Fierce Voice for Queer Liberation in Theater, Dies at 38
Diana Oh, a glitter-dusted experimental artist-activist whose theater works intertwined political provocation with profound compassion in rituals of communion with audiences, died on June 17 at their home in Brooklyn. Mx. Oh, who used the pronouns they and them, was 38. The death was confirmed by Mx. Oh's brother Han Bin Oh, who said the cause was suicide. A playwright, actor, singer-songwriter and musician, Mx. Oh created art that didn't fit neatly into categories. Mx. Oh was best known for the outraged yet disarmingly gentle Off Broadway show '{my lingerie play},' a music-filled protest against male sexual violence; it was performed in a series of 10 installations around New York City. A concert-like play — with Mx. Oh singing at its center — '{my lingerie play}' percolated with an angry awareness of the ways restrictive gender norms and society's policing of sexual desire can leave whole groups vulnerable. It was an emphatic and loving assertion of the right to be oneself without worrying about abuse. 'I was born a woman, to immigrant parents,' Mx. Oh said in the show. 'That's when my body became political. That's when I became an artist.' Mx. Oh's Infinite Love Party, which the Bushwick Starr theater in Brooklyn produced in 2019, was not a show but rather a structured celebration with a sleepover option. It was a handmade experience, including music and aerial silks, designed to welcome queer people, people of color and their allies. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
