Defineus

Ren Hang 任航

Born in 1987, based in Beijing
Ren Hang is a photographer and poet from Chang Chun

His pictures come as provocative, erotic and eerie
which often remind me of Ryan McGinley's works

http://renhang.org/

"People come into this world naked and I consider naked bodies to be people's original, authentic look. So I feel the real existence of people through their naked bodies." - Ren Hang

Define us

                                       

我每次看見這個系列都會不自覺地想起小王子，現在我終於知道了原因。

                                          

click here to explore the beautiful collection

Maurizio Zucchi

Is the head of the lifestyle company Zucchi, 

a famous and well known Italian label that make luxury household linen.

 These photos were taken by Elle Korea magazine at his beautiful home.

" The wildness of the cacti is the perfect contrast to the curated lines of the room itself. All of that greenery – filling a room with nature is the perfect antidote to living in an urban environment. "

Anna Barlow

A ceramics artist 

“The beauty of food left to melt and ooze holds a fascination for me.

 It is something that is usually over looked and temporary 

but this can be captured and frozen in time with clay and glaze.

 I have focused on ice cream as

 it is such a momentary and yet memorable treat 

that most of us have experienced

 and therefore can evoke memories of sensations and tastes,

 as well as prompt a fantasy of desired indulgences. 

I am firstly inspired by the materials I use.

 I find that clay, porcelain and glaze 

have so many wonderful possibilities 

and often translate well to represent food.” 

"I love the idea that ice-cream only lasts for seconds but once its fired, 

ceramic is permanent unless you break it."

“With ice-cream,

 the best time is just before you eat it,

 but by the end of it

 you’re all ‘oh gosh, I don’t need the rest'. 

Consumerism is momentary, 

but also fun.”

“I find it fascinating how some people dislike my sculptures,

 usually because they don’t prize food in their own lives,” she says.

 "Children in particular tend to understand it more, which makes sense.”

click here to her website

Kirsi Enkovaara

  

A furniture designer/born in Helsinki, Finland/now lives in East London

The Body-seat/2014

"I find the beauty of this product being 

when the simple form

 turns into various complicated configurations 

as a result of human interaction" 

My designs border on real and imagination. 

They usually answer the question What If? 

What if we could sit as we like? 

What if every object we own could be decomposable?

 What if we could create our own objects? 

I like people to be able to have a conversation with my designs, 

whether it be through interaction or the association that it brings.

 I love soft furniture 

and everything to do with colour, patterns and textures. 

click here to see more

Khalil Joseph

Directed by Khalil Joseph

a LA-based filmmaker

His work can be watched on http://vimeo.com/whatmattersmost

Véronique Branquinho

Thanks for Véronique Branquinho telling us what beauty is

Gareth Pugh SS2015

" The handwork, the ceremonial aspects, the playful and sometimes outlandish practices, and the unnerving notion of an outsider society, all deeply resonate with me " explains Pugh.

Giles Deacon "Design Disrupted" Spring Summer 2015

Advertising Agency: Team One, California

Creative Directors: Ryan Didonato, Andrew Smart

Media Director: Kirsten Atkinson 

Associate Media Director: Shelley Cartland

PR Director: Meg Seiler

PR Management Supervisor: Daphne Dobbs

PR Supervisor: Kat Kirsch

National Research and Partnership Manager: Lissy Galton

Assistant Account Executive: Channel Smith 

Production Company: Legs Media, New York

Executive Producer/ Founder: Adam Joseph

Executive Producer: Tom Berendsen

Director: Radical Friend

Creative Directors: Andrew Thomas Huang, Radical Friend

Producer: Jonathan Lia

Line Producer: Carrie Bornstein

Production Supervisor: Alli Maxwell

Choreographer: Ryan Heffington

Music Composition: HEALTH

Designer: Giles Deacon

Make-Up: Kabuki

Graphic Elements: Logan Seaman

VFX: Dorian Orange

Video Production: BootLegs

Lighting: Stanton Collective

Motion Graphics, Set Design and Visual Systems: Obscura Digital

Holographic Display: Musion

Video Editor: Nuno Xico and Bennett Barbakow

Alexander Calder

(July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976)
An American artist and sculptor

" Why must art be static? "

" Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions. "

" The simplest forms in the universe are the sphere and the circle. I represent them by disks and then I vary them... spheres of different sizes, densities, colours and volumes, floating in space, traversing clouds, sprays of water, currents of air, viscosities and odours – of the greatest variety and disparity. "

" My whole theory about art is the disparity that exists between form, masses and movement. "

" The underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe, or part thereof...What I mean is that the idea of detached bodies floating in space, of different sizes and densities, perhaps of different colors and temperatures, and surrounded and interlarded with wisps of gaseous condition, and some at rest, while others move in peculiar manners, seems to me the ideal source of form. "

Louise Nevelson

(September 23, 1899 – April 17, 1988) 

An American sculptor born in Czarist Russia

" There was some experimenting with painting them,

and also different woods put together, 

the tonalities, 

but not very much because 

I didn't want to make sculpture and 

I didn't want to make form as such and

I got through that very fast 

I wanted really to get beyond that.

I never thought I made sculpture or made anything. 

I'm not looking to make anything. 

I want something else entirely. 

I want that extra dimension where you don't make things; 

you live with that place and 

you give that place a form and 

in that place where you give form you bring back here and 

hope to communicate on that level. 

Some people do get it. 

Even if it's a little late, 

they get it. 

I don't know if I've said it well, 

but I'll say it again: 

I don't want to make sculpture and

I don't want to make paintings; 

I'm not looking to make anything. 

I myself need, 

for my place of consciousness, a form.

It's almost like you are an architect that's building through shadow and light and dark. 

You are really an architect in that place, 

but you don't want to make buildings for people; 

you are -- in another dimension 

you are the architect, you see. 

But it's a very real world. 

I never use a word like "imagination" because

that word "imagination" means to me that 

you extend immediately to that great dimension.

So it's not imagination. 

It's a great reality 

but the material you are using is in that place instead of in this place, 

you see. 

So it isn't through the intellect, 

it's through vision that you give form and structure to that place. 

And so, naturally, you are an architect in that place. "

" Memory "

"Like mood boards you'd pin your favorite images to,"he said.

Chris Burden

Born in Boston in 1946, grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, France and Italy.
An American artist working in performance, sculpture, and installation art.

SHOOT  (November 19, 1971)

"At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend.
The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle.
My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me."

 Trans-fixed (April 23, 1974) 

"Inside a small garage on Speedway Avenue,

I stood on the rear bumper of a Volkswagen.

I lay on my back over the rear section of the car,

stretching my arms onto the roof. Nails are driven through my palms onto the roof of the car. 

The garage door was opened and the car was pushed half way out into the speedway. 

Screaming for me the engine was run at full speed for two minutes. 

After two minutes, 

the engine was turned off and the car pushed back into the garage. 

The door was closed."

tehching hsieh 謝德慶

A New York City-based performance artist
Born on December 31st 1950 in Nan-Chou, Taiwan

" I felt painting was limited, my paintings became emptier, only the movement of hand is left, so I stopped painting and started doing actions. "

" I began to take photographs but it was a continuation of my painting. Then I bought a Super 8 camera to document my actions. I used it to document the process where I exposed 100 sheets of photo paper one by one on the ground in a zigzag manner, then flipped all of them over from the first one; the photo paper turned dark sequentially while exposed under the sunshine. In 1973 I jumped from a second-floor window onto a concrete floor and had it recorded with the Super 8 camera. This became my first action piece. "

" The work is destructive, it is a gesture of saying goodbye to painting, broken ankles were out of my prediction. I have no interest in masochism."

" I knew it was risky, but I wasn’t sure in what degree I would be injured. I broke both ankles and have had pain ever since."

" One day all of a sudden I thought: what else do I look for? I don’t need to go out to find art, I am already in my work."

One Year Performance 1978–1979 

" Staying in a cage for a few days can be boring. Staying for 365 days, it is not the same anymore and you are brought to another state of living. You need to do intense thinking to survive through the year, otherwise you could lose your mind. "

" Yes, the thinking process itself became a piece of work: the cage piece. It is an isolated piece with little impact from outside. "

" I didn’t need to deal with trifles in daily life when staying in the cage, I had freethinking, I lived thoroughly in art time and just passed time. The freedom found in the confinement is what one could find in a difficult situation, it is a way to understand life."

One Year Performance 1980–1981

" Punching the time clock itself is the work, I don’t need to produce anything. The 8760 times of punching in throughout the year is repetition, but in another way, each punch in is different from any other punch in, as time passes by." 

         

" Once a child asked me, “is future yesterday?” We all ask questions about time in different ways. Time is beyond my understanding, I only experience time by doing life."

" I’m not a masochistic person, I don’t emphasize pain. We can talk about suffering but then we have to talk about freedom. Or we can talk about freedom, but we also have to talk about discipline. There are many things interwoven. "

 

" I read Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus when I was 18, and I encountered its inspiration again and again in my early age. Rebellion, betrayal, crime, punishment, suffering and freedom form a cycle in my life experience, and are transformed in art. I’m not a person using words to create, I use art, but their thoughts inspire me, and I practice in life."

 

One Year Performance 1981–1982

" We don’t look at survival that closely. We pretend to smile. We are all taught to say everything is O.K., we are in control, even if we are not. There is a need to be positive in public. But art is not doing that. We try to tell the truth in someway, to touch a part of it, to not be so typical. This kind of work is not about suffering, it is about existence. It is about a technique, my concept is to show this technique. I think technique is the most important thing."

"I felt depressing after I finished Outdoor Piece, and I felt the same after the other pieces, because of emptiness as well as having to come back to normal life and dealing with the reality."

" The struggle is there because of the situation in life and in art, but I don’t emphasise it, my work is not autobiographical."

Art / Life: One Year Performance 1983-1984

" I got the idea for this piece because there are problems about communication with people. I feel this is always my struggle. So I wanted to do one piece about human beings and their struggle in life with each other. I find being tied together is a very clear idea, because I feel that to survive we're all tied up. We cannot go in life alone, without people. Because everybody is individual we each have our own idea of something we want to do. But we're together. So we become each other's cage. We struggle because everybody wants to feel freedom. We don't touch, and this helps us to be conscious that this relationship connects individuals, but the individuals are independent. We are not a couple, but two separate people. So this piece to me is a symbol of life and human struggle. And why one year's time? Because then this has real experience of time and life. To do work one week or two weeks, I feel that it may become like just doing a performance. But I do it one year and then the piece becomes art and life—it's real connection and that has more power. Also a year is a symbol of things happening over and over. "

One Year Performance 1985–1986 

" Art has its own life. The document of art is a trace through which you can approach my work, but it doesn’t equal the art itself. Audiences will use their own experience and imagination to approach my work."

" My idea is that time becomes the main thing, how I pass the time is my main concern. It doesn’t matter what I do, I pass time."

" After I did the piece where I did not do art for one year, I cannot go back and do a piece again.Everything I do is in a progression, an evolution. If I do one year without making art, what is the next step in the progression? If I go back to do another one-year performance like the earlier pieces, it doesn't make sense. Do you understand? The next logical step was to just survive into the next century, the new millennium. To do another work of art I have to go somewhere else in the universe which is why I said after the 13-year piece I just survived, on earth, the next step is out of this world because I have done what I can do here. On another planet I could do something. Our time is very short here. When we speak of historical figures we say they were born this year, died that year. Or, we say, they are still alive. That’s all we talk about really. It’s just like the dinosaurs, all we can talk about is when they lived and died.So for me, I use similar language. I can only say that I have kept myself alive. More details are unnecessary, survival is all. What I have done in those years remains in my mind.So you understand now, if I want to do art again, I cannot. I can enjoy life and do what I like, but not art."

Tehching Hsieh 1986–1999 

" Art cannot exist without public, but the public could be in the future – I published the work after thirteen years."

" One year is the largest single unit of how we count time. It takes the earth a year to move around the sun. Three years, four years is something else. It is about being human, how we explain time, how we measure our existence. A century is another mark, which is how the last piece was created. "

" Not doing art anymore is an exit for me. Art or life, to me the quality is not much different, without the form of art, still, life is life sentence, life is passing time, life is freethinking."

" Thinking is a basic activity to continue life. I don’t do art any more. I don’t have other things to say."