Zheng and his collaborators in the Yangjiang Group, Sun Qinglin and Chen Zaiyan,use Chinese calligraphy and alcohol to occupy exactly this space – the unconscious mind seething up through the cleft created when you know vaguely what it is you’re trying to say, but you’re so bladdered on the local Zhujiang Beer you can barely hold an ink brush.
Hotel art is so often synonymous with mass-produced prints, thoughtlessly arranged in carbon-copied rooms. But there a few emerging boutique properties who are celebrating artistic expression and embracing artists, both locally and on a global scale.
When I meet Ben Quilty he looks and smells exactly as I imagined. He’s dressed in a flannelette shirt, jeans and sneakers, with scruffy hair and a beard that’s fiercely thick. He smells of oil paint and I can see it still jammed under his fingernails. Sitting in a leafy courtyard at the National Art School, Quilty disarms me with his warm and welcoming presence despite the obvious emotion he displays as we start discussing his latest exhibition.
An unsettling, architectural gem of a building, it is a clutter of wood paneling, pictures and paranoia. So visually overpowering that if it weren’t for the immediate mugging by fabulous Mediterranean and Cornish aromas, you could easily miss lunch, altogether.
One of China’s leading fashion photographers, Chen Man, will showcase her unique vision at Bangkok’s Metropolitan by COMO hotel in just over a month.
It’s easy to see where America’s greatest illustrator took inspiration from as we pull into Stockbridge, a small, New England town in the Berkshires. Norman Rockwell, considered by many America’s most popular artist of the 20th century, made his home here in 1953. He became so attached to the community, he established a trust while he was still alive, ensuring his works would be left to the Stockbridge Historical Society, who later created the Norman Rockwell Museum.
Boston’s a city dear to my heart. I grew up just a couple of hours south, in Connecticut, a small state that straddles New York and New England; the best of both worlds.
It is difficult to imagine Liz Anne Macgregor being humble. But the tenacious flame-haired Scott who has headed one of Australia’s premier cultural icons for the past 13 years says that is just what overseeing its $53 million revamp has made her. “It’s neen humbling, exhilarating exasperating, but finally it’s come together and look at the results,’’ she tells Lunch Magazine from the Sculpture Garden on level three of the new wing that was three years in the making. “There were moments when I thought it was never going to happen and I felt like saying “let’s give it up and go home’.’’
A smaller, quieter, more charming sister to Cannes, Le Cannet is just a few miles west of the French Riviera’s most glamourous city. Le Cannet is also now home to the first museum devoted to the French 19th and 20th century artist Pierre Bonnard.
I have it on good authority that this form of graffiti, known as ‘tagging’, is considered by street artists as tantamount to dogs marking their territory.
A report to be released later this month will uncover the most visible boutique…
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Perched atop the Metropolitan Tower, overlooking Suzhou's heritage-listed gardens, famed Grand Canal and the majestic Taihu Lake is the Shangri-La…
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