A joint project with the Graf design firm, A to Z Cafe, with its original artwork, mismatched furniture, and liberal use of worn wood and corrugated iron, is a cool place to spend the afternoon. Nara’s conceptual home on the range provides an interesting contrast to the fifth-floor view of the teeming metropolis outside.

Tucked behind Omotesando’s hustle and bustle

Inside Nara’s atelier

A closer look on Nara’s works (his drawings are worth thousands of dollars!)

A little store selling his books etc

Jonathan Monk’s new poster for Specific Object is typical of Monk’s style appropriating Jeff Koons with a deflated rabbit and an image of the artist with a John Baldessari red dot.

The joint launch of the exhibition between Lisson Gallery in London and Casey Kaplan in New York had been a huge success having the same works sold in two different cities at the same time.

Check it out at www.lissongallery.com / www.caseykaplangallery.com

Aside from Louise Bourgeois who’s now 98, Yayoi Kusama is probably the oldest woman artist from Japan also known as the “polka dot or pumpkin lady.”   The polka dots, her latest installation at the Gagosian, are a recurrent motif issued from her childhood’s hallucination which she explored in the fifties.  Her works and installations all share an obsession with repetition, pattern and accumulation. She describes herself as an obsessive artist and has struggled with mental illness. Today, she lives and work in Japan.  From her own decision, she now lives in a mental institution in Tokyo, nearby her studio. 

We’re crazy about Tracey Emin so we were very excited to see the latest exhibition at Mason’s Yard. We love Emin’s outspoken ferocity including the listing of all the people she slept with in a tent, or for example the sending of urgent messages such as “My Cunt is Wet with Fear” or “People Like You Need To Fuck People Like Me” or “Fantastic To Feel Beautiful Again.”

It is clear that all of Emin’s work is a result of some trauma, some terrible stifling of her voice, or shock to her system.  It is essential for her to communicate her dilemma as being hers alone. This gives the most awkward pieces an obsessive edge.  She is fearless, almost joyful at times, in her dark relief at the freedom she has won to get it all into the open.

We like this particular piece but her works are so in demand we were third on the wait list. This maybe a sign that the art market is getting better for quality stuff.

www.pollocks.org

Other noteworthy artists in the exhibition are Iraqi artist Halim Al-Karim (3rd and 4th photos), Lebanese artist Marwan Rechmaoui with Beirut’s current map in engraved rubber (5th) and Iranian artist Shirin Fakhim with her Sara Lucas-esque Tehran Prostitute installations.

The last two photos are not exactly from a Middle Eastern artist but from two of China’s most controversial artists renowned for working with extreme material such as human fat tissue, live animals, and baby cadavers to deal with issues of perception, death, and human condition.  Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Old Persons Home hilariously wicked, their satirical models of decrepit OAPS look suspiciously familiar to world leaders, long crippled and impotent, left to battle it out in true geriatric style. Placed in electric wheelchairs, the withered toothless, senile and drooling, are set on a collision course for international conflict as they roll about the gallery at snail’s pace, crashing into each other at random in a grizzly parody of the U.N. dead.