Contemporary artists by kui

Peter Greenaway (Film-maker)

Famous works/exhibitions you may have come across or heard of
The Pillow Book (1996)

The Cook , The Thief , His Wife and Her lover(1989)

Recent work/project/exhibition
Nightwatching(2007)

History

Even though Peter Greenaway is an Englishman, he was actually born in Newport in Wales (his mother is Welsh) on April 5th, 1942. The family left Wales when Greenaway was three years-old and moved to Essex, England. At an early age he decided he wanted to be a painter. He developed an interest in European cinema, focusing on the films of Antonioni, Bergman, Godard, Pasolini and Resnais. In 1962 he started studying at the Walthamstow College of Art, where amongst his fellow students was musician Ian Dury (who Greenaway would later cast in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover). Greenaway would spend the next three years there, and at the time of arriving there he made his first film, Death of Sentiment. It was about church yard furniture, crosses, flying angels, typography on grave stones, and was filmed in four large London cemeteries. In 1965 he joined the Central Office of Information (COI), where he remained for the next eleven years as a film editor and then a director. In 1966 he made a film called Train, composed of footage of the last steam train arriving at Waterloo Station (directly behind the COI), structured into an abstract Man Ray ballet mécanique, all cut to a musique concrete track. He also made a film called Tree in 1966, the tree in question was surrounded by concrete outside the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank in London. The 1970s would see Greenaway getting much more serious with his filmmaking. In 1978 he made Vertical Features Remake and A Walk Through H. The former is an examination of arithmetical structure and the latter a journey through various maps. In 1980 Greenaway delivered his most ambitious and extraordinary film of his career, The Falls - a mammoth, fantastical, absurdist encyclopedia of flight-associated material all relating to 92 victims of the Violent Unknown Event (VUE). The 1980s would see some of Greenaway's best films, The Draughtsman's Contract in 1982, A Zed & Two Noughts in 1985, The Belly of an Architect in 1987, Drowning by Numbers in 1988, and his most successful (in the mainstream) film in 1989, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. The 1990s brought the visually spectacular Prospero's Books in 1991, the controversial The Baby of Mâcon in 1993, The Pillow Book in 1996, and 8 1/2 Women in 1999.

Characteristic/Critics’ viewpoint

Peter Greenaway is a filmmaker trained as a painter. He has long been sceptical about the restrictive boundaries of cinema, and you could not say that his films were obsessive about the traditional characteristics of cinema. His films are very distinctive and stray well off the beaten path. Some commentators have said that his films are anti-cinematic and that he is not a filmmaker at all. He might not disagree with that. He is disquieted by the inability of the cinema that we now have, to give us all the rich potential excitements of the early 21st century world. No touch, no smell, no temperature, short duration. Passive, sedentary audiences, no real audience dialogue, overloaded technical specifications in set piece High Street architecture, limited to a single frame at a time, visible from only one direction. Excessive desire for reality, temporary sets, actors trained to pretend, flat illusions, little comprehension of a screen as a screen. Omnipotent financial vested interests, and the tyrannies of the frame, the actor and the text. And most disturbing of all, subject to the tyranny of the camera.

Why I choose

I am in favour of films rather than traditional arts and have heard of his great name in presenting a movie or film to the audience. In an article of local magazine ‘Milk’, he was interviewed once and talked about the film made by most of the people are based on textual stories, rather than a story based on ‘images and being shocked by his viewpoints, I remembered his name and recalled it while researching contemporary artists.

Uta Barth (Photographer)

Famous works/exhibitions you may have come across or heard of
In Between Places ( Retrospective) (2000)

Recent work/project/exhibition
Uta Barth 2005 Sies+Höke Gallery, Düsseldorf (Invitation exhibition)

History

Uta Barth (born 1958 in Berlin) is a contemporary photographer who lives and works in Los Angeles. Barth was a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004-05.Now she has been the professor of Dept of Art in University of California at Riverside since 1990
http://www.renabranstengallery.com/Bio_Barth.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uta_Barth

Characteristic/Critics’ Viewpoint
Barth’s images of interiors, buildings, suburban roads or natural environments are often out of focus, cropped and apparently empty of any foreground subject.
Uta Barth's photographic works question the traditional functions of pictures and our expectations of them. By photographing in ordinary anonymous places - in simple rooms, city streets, airports and fields - Barth uses what is natural and unstudied to shift attention away from the subject matter, and redirect focus to a consciousness of the processes of perception and the visceral and intellectual pleasures of seeing
http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/2aa/2aa239.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uta_Barth

Why I choose
Mainly due to the use of out-of-focus technique to make my eye focus on photo while I think she renewed the role of out-of-focus part and make it as the ‘focus’ of the photo.

Junichi Kakizaki柿崎順一(Floral artist)

Recent work/project/exhibition
Butoh flowers of life and decay
(Co-operative work with dancer Su-En) (2007)

History

Junichi Kakizaki (柿崎順一, born January 4, 1971 Nagano) is a floral designer. He exhibits regularly both in Japan and internationally. Since 2006, he has mainly worked on stage decorations. Kakizaki was born in Nagano, Japan and has been a floral designer since 1990. His first solo exhibition was in 2003, the same year he won Television Tokyo Channel 12's national floristry championship in the programme Television Champion. He learned floral artistry from Muneyoshi Tsuchiya, then moved to Tokyo, where he entered the Yoyogi Seminer Formative Arts School. In 1990, he entered The Botanical College of Technological Horticulture, in the Horticultural sciences department, and took a specialist course in Floral Design. He became a student of Sadao Kasahara and established a Floral design office, "Fleur de Noel". At this time he also worked in floral photography. Kakizaki's design career started with a job at Serendipity Design in Tokyo where he worked on films, television programmes, and...
http://www.freebase.com/view/en/junichi_kakizaki

Characteristic/Critics’ viewpoint
He designed floral decorations for the butoh(dance) performances the "Kazuo Ohno Butoh at Hasedera" by Kazuo Ohno and Yoshito Ohno (1999) and "Kazuo Ohno Butoh at Hasedera 2000" by Kazuo Ohno and conceptual artist Yutaka Matsuzawa (2000). In 2002 he was part of a team responsible for the floral designs for "2 New Dance Pieces" by the Richard Hart's Guren Dance Theater. He founded Floridance with Hart in the same year. Foridance has performed many times, mainly in Nagano. He designed the floral art for the butoh dance production "New Life", commissioned by the city of Uppsala, Sweden and performed at the Swedish Embassy in Roppongi, Tokyo (2007).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junichi_Kakizaki

Why I choose
Flower is always the icon of beauty and I believe the flowers possess of powerful energy as human body does and he is quite special in using flowers in dancing.

Kui