Art in Embassies American Institute Taipei Exhibit

AIT Director Moy: As AIT Director one of the great honors I have is the chance to install an art exhibition in my residence. Kathy and I hope that this exhibition tells a visual story of what it is like to be an American today. We selected pieces that are meaningful to us personally and that represent the diversity of culture in the United States. We are proud to bring to Taiwan a sample of artwork that we feel captures contemporary America – the beauty, the energy, and the soul.

Full Transcript

0:00 y gaby woman John me you general atomics chance I swine goblin cultural machine
0:14 woman soy already in Chicago your life when Jack a can shoot how woman chance i
0:20 jus chillin current in labor so this is probably my favorite painting in the
0:26 collection it’s a painting by Brett Emery and his waiting series called
0:32 waiting number 230 I’d really like it because it captures a real sense of
0:39 loneliness and alone s using very simple planes lights shadows and color and it
0:47 really army captures the fundamental experiment experience
0:53 Kevin you and I we grew up in urban settings you grew up in big cities and
0:56 so this scene which captures as you just said alienation loneliness is actually
1:02 very typical in cities and that’s why we really liked it a lot
1:06 the artist jose parla has painted uh families and migration across the world
1:13 and this painting is very interesting because it depicts if you look very
1:18 closely it looks like a collisional forces but if you take a step back you
1:24 look at the swirls the circles in the painting you can actually see harmony
1:30 and energy coming from and that’s what we really like we like Hannah Barrett’s
1:35 work so much we have had to her paintings in our collection on this is
1:39 job and over here it’s pretty dangerous are paintings are colorful their delay
1:46 there was a cold and and at the same time they actually carry a more serious
1:53 message on that of gender identity
1:56 yeah and Barrett I think lives in a very interesting and strange world sometimes
2:01 and you can see in the painting some of the images she paints here for instance
2:06 flowers with pedals are looking like their arms are flexing or arms akimbo
2:10 like this and this actually made me laugh out loud this this man was typing
2:16 on a typewriter know Kathy’s writer so it made me laugh and he’s typing on a
2:20 piece of paper punctuation marks and they seem like they’re floating off into
2:24 space
2:26 actually they often feel that way when I have writer’s block chain gene is a
2:31 taiwan born american artist and his work has been influenced by manga graffiti as
2:39 well as fantasy comics and you can see that in this work here it’s called a
2:43 drip and it’s a painting of a beautiful princess in the middle of crashing waves
2:49 around are very dangerous crashing waves and
2:51 on the theme of what you would think of the Japanese hokusai paintings
2:56 it’s beautiful lapis blue the colors are really vibrant that’s what we really
3:01 like about this we also feel very fortunate to have james jeans are here
3:04 because my daughter Olivia really likes manga and this really reminds her of
3:09 Japanese money we’re really fortunate because we have the opportunity to
3:14 feature to pieces by two of the most influential contemporary artist in
3:19 America elizabeth marie and Jennifer Bartlett this is a painting called deep
3:23 blue sea and you can see in its abstract you know method this coffee cup and it
3:32 can barely contain the beverage inside of it and the the liquid inside the
3:38 beverage almost seems like it’s roaring waves coming over the edge
3:43 this is a picture that wakes me up every morning I follow jennifer Bartlett’s
3:47 painting since the nineteen eighties when I saw a retrospective of hers
3:51 around the Minneapolis area and in this painting is called Earth fireworks and
3:56 it is reminiscent of my childhood actually when we used to go out and
4:02 crowd around the FDR bridge and look at the night sky on july 4th and see the
4:07 fireworks streaming down on us as we look deep into the night sky
4:11 one of America’s great art exports is jazz music and jazz is also one of the
4:18 most expressive forms of music too
4:20 and so we have two pieces one a collage and another one a copy print of a
4:25 photograph that was featured in a very famous life magazine cover in 1966 these
4:32 two pieces use Jazz’s as an inspiration in Lucille nurses singer for saxophonist
4:39 you can see the woman singer at the center of this collage ready to belt out
4:45 a very powerful solo and Louie Armstrong the photo Louie Armstrong you can see
4:54 that he is a larger-than-life personality in a photograph it’s very
4:58 difficult to capture someone in was so that such a big personality and in a two
5:05 dimensional form and so Philip osman the photograph a photographer is able to
5:10 film him or to shoot him at such an extreme angle that he almost seems like
5:15 he’s bursting into the third dimension