2012 Pritzker Prize Winner: Wang Shu

Chinese architect Wang Shu, has won the Pritzker Prize (architecture’s most prestigious award). Wang is based in Hangzho ,west of Shanghai, and runs his firm “Amateur Architecture Studio” with his wife. He is known for incorporating salvaged materials into bold, contemporary buildings. Wang’s projects include the Ningbo History Museum constructed from more than one million pieces of salvaged stone, brick, and tile. The jury chose Wang due to his thoughtful alternatives to sleek, generic towers that typify the rapidly modernizing skyline of China.

Read more about it in this article by The Los Angeles Times and watch a slideshow of his structures by Artinfo.

Ceramic House, designed by Wang Shu in Jinhua, China / Associated Press

 

Artprice Annual Art Market Report 2011

The Artprice‘s annual art market report for 2011 is out and it has nothing but good news for the people in the art market: “In 2011, the global art auction market generated 21% more than in 2010 and there is not a single segment of the art market that did not progress in terms of turnover.”

According to the report, China continues to have the biggest turnover in auction revenues and be the fastest growing one too, in addition to the 49% growth in auction revenue from artworks in China, a number of other Asian countries have also posted particularly dynamic growth, such as Singapore (+22%) and Indonesia (+39%).

Read a short summary here and download the full 50 pages report (including as usual the Top 500 artists by auction revenue and the Top 100 auction results of the year).

Arts Cuts in the UK

The Economist has an interesting article about how the state funds and subsidies in the UK have been helping different clusters of artistic activities in the past and how the new cuts will affect these activities. Read the article here, or listen to the podcast here.

The artist community is not silent about the cuts, for instance a very interesting website was launched recently with the aim of of recording all the organizations, initiatives, projects, commissions, tours and more that will be lost due to cuts in public spending on the arts.

screenshot from http://www.lost-arts.org

Mies van der Rohe’s landmark reopened

One of Mies van der Rohe’s finest glass-and-steel structures, “Villa Tugendhat”  reopened in Czech Republic. The building is one of the first examples of modern architecture in Europe and carries a very interesting history to day.
Read about the landmark’s interesting history and more about its structure in this article by The New York Times.

Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic.
photo from Wikimedia Commons

Ai Weiwei’s Photographs and Videos at the Jeu de Paume, Paris

Jeu de Paume is hosting a major exhibition of photographs and videos by Ai Weiwei. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Fotomuseum de Winterthur, where it was first showed last summer and is curated by Urs Stahel, director of the Fotomuseum.

Étude de perspective – La tour Eiffel 1995-2003 Ai Weiwei – © Ai Weiwei

The featured photographs cover the past thirty years of the artist’s life, from his New York years in the 1980’s to his current Beijing studio activities. Photographs of radical urban transformation, of the search for earthquake victims, and the destruction of his Shanghai studio are presented together with his art photography projects, the Documenta project “Fairytale”, the countless Cell phone pictures posted on his blog.

For more, check out Ai Weiwei’s Photo Albums on Google+, read the exhibition’s catalog (PDF download) and don’t miss the very recent FT interview with the artist  with a short video of his studio.

What: Ai Weiwei, Entrelacs  (Interlacing)

When:  21 February 2012 – 29 May 2012

Where: Le Jeu de Paume
1 place de la Concorde
75008 Paris

Interact With Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”

Peter Velleris created an interactive animation of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” (1889), the template (made by OpenFramework) responds to the movement of viewer’s fingers, creating a flow of oil lines on the painting accompanied by an ambient music which is coherent with the flow.

The work is at once a dialogue between the two artists through two very different mediums and acts as a bridge between the viewers and Van Gogh’s masterpiece, allowing them to interact freely with the artwork.

I imagine the experience to be very pleasant, fortunately the artist has promised to port the application to iPad and Android, making the experience accessible to a wide public audience.

For some technical details about the work check out this link, and to watch more animations inspired by classic works head to this article by The Atlantic.

Starry Night (interactive animation) from Petros Vrellis.